a blog by Peter Leonard
Today I went down to Copenhagen for a literature seminar with the Danish author Pablo Henrik Llambías. The original idea behind getting together was to read a Nordic work of "non-fiction prose," a tricky genre which includes things such as travel narrative and personal memoirs. A friend asked me if I could think of any recent Swedish books in this tradition, but the only things I could think of was Gellert Tamas' Lasermannen and Magnus Linton's Americanos. While both of those are very worthwhile books, they're pretty securely grounded in their own specific geographies and time periods (early-90s Sweden and contemporary Latin America, respectively).
Instead of either of those two books, I suggested Swedish author Sara Stridsberg's recent re-imagining of the life of Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who is perhaps best known for trying to assassinate Andy Warhol. Stridsberg, who translated Solanas' SCUM Manifesto into Swedish in 2003, has long held a fascination with the American woman who spent much of her life as a prostitute and drug abuser but whose radical critique of men (and the existing women's movement) remains a powerful piece of political literature. In the introduction to her translation, Stridsberg wrote:
The book that followed after translating the SCUM Manifesto, Drömfakulteten: ett tillägg till sexualteorien (The Dream Faculty: A Supplement to the Theory of Sexuality), stands as Stridsberg's attempt to imagine, or re-imagine, enough of the personal history of Solanas in order to fill her out as a person, rescue her ideas from the shadow of her conviction for attempted murder, and engage in a conversation that Solanas' death in 1988 rendered impossible. Needless to say, these are not the aims of most conventional novels.
Instead, Stridsberg's intense personal connection with (the idea of) Solanas is what prompted me to think of her book in connection with the problem of non-fiction prose. In Drömfakulteten, Stridsberg imagines a "narrator" sitting beside Solanas' bed in a San Francisco SRO as the feminist icon endures a slow, painful death from years of drug abuse and prostitution. The narrator serves rather clearly as a proxy for Stridsberg herself, declaring "I have 250,000 academic points from the university and all I dream about is a faculty like you." The phrase "dream faculty" works a little better in Swedish than in English, but it refers to the idea that Solanas represents the power or capacity to imagine a different world. "You romanticize and sentimentalize," Solanas retorts in Stridsberg's book; "You've fallen in love with somebody who doesn't exist." This interplay between a thinly-disguised author and a fictionalized real-life figure is what gives Drömfakulteten its relevance to a discussion of non-fiction prose.
Llambías's own writing -- most clearly Rådhus, a meditation on identity and symbolism -- flits around some of these same issues, as do the books of his contemporary, Claus Beck-Nielsen. So it was a real treat to have him in the room as the Danish students talked about this Swedish book. Interestingly enough he saw certain areas of the text -- the formal "Alphabets" that periodically interrupt the narrative -- as containing hints of a new form of narrative poetics. And I was glad to see that I wasn't the only one to think that the "American wasteland" trope that Stridsberg avails herself of throughout the text was a little heavy-handed. In Drömfakulteten Solanas' real-life childhood in urban New Jersey has been replaced with an upbringing in the Georgia "desert" (?), presumably to mirror the heroine's later political alienation by means of an earlier geographical isolation. Her childhood as Stridsberg imagines it is hellish enough, characterized by an incestuous father and a mother who is unable, or unwilling, to defend her daughter.
This mother figure runs like a red thread throughout the book, with the Stridsberg stand-in "narrator" assuming a maternal role towards the dying Solanas, trying in vain to give her the encouragement and positive reënforcement she never received from her own family. But a side effect of loading the mother figure with so much import for Valerie is it risks diminishing her own original energy in favor of a kind of bargain-basement Freudian reading of her tragic family situation. That Valerie is depicted as constantly seeking, and never receiving, acknowledgment and support for her achievements in college and grad school (against such long odds) reduces her to a kind of permanent child, not the driven and intelligent figure that the real-life Solanas appears to have been. It's odd that Stridsberg chooses a maternal, rather than sisterly, engagement with Solanas -- not so much solidarity as personal loyalty seems to characterize the "narrator's" attraction to this radical prostitute. This is a contradiction that lies close to the heart of Stridsberg's re-imagining of Solanas, for her entire literary engagement seems to be best justified as a thought experiment precisely aimed at the transformation of not just perception but reality. "One person who believes is a utopia. Two who believe are a reality," says Solanas' therapist in the book, and perhaps no better summation of Stridsberg's fascination for both Solanas and her ideals could be written.
You can read a sample translation of The Dream Faculty here (Word format). Reviews of the book are online from Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter.