It has been two weeks since Stig Larsson was a guest on P1’s Sunday interview and since then the presenter Martin Wicklin has been criticized in columns and podcasts. For those of you who haven’t heard it, he started from a basic question for the book-current author: how does it feel to have once been declared a genius and then experience that time has run away from you? In the studio, Larsson was confronted with his old statements, such as about the ph value in underage girls’ abdomens.
The next day, Jack Hildén moved out The evening paper. He believed that the interview technique bordered “on sadism” and that Wicklin only wanted to get “Stig Larsson to admit what a wretched person he is”. It was an “execution”. “Excellent text about a strange interview” supported Expressen’s Victor Malm on X. DN’s Lisa Magnusson chimed in and wrote that the program vibrated with “restrained rage” and that Wicklin wanted to reduce Larsson to “a perverted predation”. “Incomparably lousy interview”, Fredrik Virtanen grumbled.
Had we listened on the same program? I think the interview was very interesting through and through. Stig Larsson himself was sincere and reconsidering, had self-distance and gave Wicklin answers when he thought it was needed. He was clear about his writing and about his position throughout the decades. And he was aware that he hurt people and seems to be genuinely thinking about why. When he afterwards in SvD commenting on the interview, he said: “Wicklin gave me a good match, I think.”
But the loud reactions were telling. It is as if our time lives with phantom pains after the great genius.
I was myself a devoted Stig Larsson reader during the 1980s. When you read him, you had to think about what art really was. He introduced a kind of fresh and postmodern intelligence into Swedish literature. It declined in the 90s. Then Larsson deliberately began to write poorly – funny as a violation of norms, annoying in the long run. He named anyone who pointed it out as an enemy. Apparently I was one of them. After I wrote critically about one of his books, he was invited to a freelance meeting at DN’s cultural editorial office. When I was standing with my three-month-old daughter in my arms, he came forward and shouted “I’m going to pee in your palate so you can never speak again”.
None of the otherwise vocal cultural writers intervened. Stig Larsson was a genius.
I am surprised to see how more and more of today’s writers and critics are again, just as unindependently, circling around people like Horace Engdahl, Lars Norén or just Stig Larsson
During the last ten years this male genius has been questioned, all his pretenses and privileges, his misogyny and self-mythologizing. It was welcome and I myself thought that now we had finally entered a new era. But I am surprised to see how more and more of today’s writers and critics are once again, just as independently, circling people like Horace Engdahl, Lars Norén or just Stig Larsson.
In the online magazine Kvartal, the poet and writer Anna Axfors gives a good explanation as to why. “It is popular to question the existence of genius because today hates elitism (but loves success),” she writes accurately. She herself turns against the contemporary peppy “everyone can write!” cry and believes that it may not be democratic at all, that writing is not a job like any other but requires something unique and inexplicable.
In many ways, that stance is understandable. We live in a raw and brutal economy where it is difficult for serious art and literature to survive. In addition, we have a strong right-wing populism that wants to polarize and whip up hatred by talking about the “cultural elite”. It is healthy and understandable that many want to defend again what must be special about art and the people who devote their lives to it.
That which, however is harder to understand is that so little has happened to the genius craze’s image of who is a genius – or what is genius. And that the reinstallation of our time is so unimaginative. That it is still the same animal as a new generation, women as well as men, continues to circle. That you don’t place people like Suzanne Osten, Lena Cronqvist or Karin Johannisson next to the old usual male icons.
It’s too sad.
The fact that Stig Larsson has become more humble, talks about shame or thinks about the relationship between pride and lack of love makes him interesting in my eyes for the first time in twenty-five years. He has moved on and today can see the reverse side of the genius myth. It seems considerably more difficult for his starry-eyed worshippers.
Read more columns by Åsa Beckman herefor example “Robert Aschberg made an obscene gesture in front of Malena Ivarsson”. Also subscribe to her newsletter which comes every Monday and where she gives cultural tips and chooses five favorite articles from the week.
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Stig Larsson: “It hurts like hell to be hated”
