‘I am an author’, he said laughingly, ‘and I think that you’re an author too’

A dream and a translation of Chapter Four of Stig Larsson's The Autists (1979)

I’ve been sleeping too much so I’ve been having nightmares. It’s as if oversleeping makes one’s consciousness bend in on itself, so that one glimpses those long forgotten things closer to its core. I dreamt that I was trying to introduce the works of Stig Larsson to a proud sadistic girl from my childhood, a task that I recall was met with a shattering difference of opinion. Fortunately, Stig Larsson was actually present to explain his project, so I chose to embarrass the girl by asking him very directly. His explanation, which I don’t remember in full, held that by the year 1999, the human ‘self’ no longer possessed explanatory power, that there had been a decoupling of sorts between events and the entities we posit to explain those events. The modern mythology of the self, of ‘intentional explanation’, like the ancient mythologies of gods, had exhausted itself. Someone then spoke about drinking ‘dirty coffee’ that somehow enhanced its potency so that it lasted all day. Another person mentioned modafinil as having a similar kind of effect. I spoke, in front of Stig, about amphetamines in small doses having a shorter half-life and therefore being more manageable, to which he responded with some questions about my usage.

Last time I mentioned Stig in these pages was in the preface to my first travel diary. I read several of his works last summer after finally getting a hold of them in a second-hand bookshop in Stockholm. Many friends had recommended me to him over the years, some labelling him the best contemporary Swedish writer. Stig lives in a little flat on Lilla Essingen, one of Stockholm’s smaller central islands, and is an uncompromising artist, much maligned in recent years, with a cult following. His book Autisterna (1979) is considered to be a modern Swedish classic, but has not been previously translated into English as far as I’m aware. A better English title than ‘The Autists’ might be ‘The Schizos’ since the sixteen chapters that make up the book appear to follow a fragmented rhizomatic self (or selves) through unsettling and abject adventures. After meeting him in a dream in Spain, I’ve decided to publish a chapter from my own translation: a tale that directly touches on the themes of authorship, autism, and schizophrenia that define the work.

THE AUTISTS

by STIG LARSSON

Translated by Alexander

Four

His name was Torsten. That’s right, Torsten. Throughout the spring of 1963 I commuted between Stuttgart and Paris. One evening in Mars, I decided not to fly, but to hitchhike. I took a bus to the outskirts of town, the night was cold and I was poorly dressed, but already after ten minutes a Swedish-registered Volkswagen stopped, I said in Swedish that I was going to Paris, and he laughed and said that I had been fucking lucky. He said he was on his way to West Africa and could go through Paris all the same. ‘Do you know what I am?’ he said after a while. ‘No, how am I supposed to know that’, I responded. ‘I am an author’, he said laughingly, ‘and I think that you’re an author too’. I asked him why he thought that, and he said that he had had a feeling, had I really not written anything, he asked, not since I wrote assignments in school, yes letters of course, I said, I thought he seemed weird, not as if he were drunk, but truly weird. ‘What do you write then?’ I asked. He turned the volume down on the radio. ‘I like you instinctively’, he said, ‘I want to tell you something, would you like to hear, it’ll be quite long’. I got more and more interested, but I didn’t want to show it, so I said nothing. ‘I started to write something already in the mid-forties, I continued for seventeen years, it took more and more time each page, it sounds unbelievable, but so it was. I tried to describe a person that was no longer a person, it concerned the outer areas of a figure, someone that one cannot touch, someone who escaped my grip. There’s a core to every fictional character, a logical continuity and wholeness, but I didn’t want to give him that power, allowing him instead to vibrate with insecurity, each impression did not coalesce, but was lost, the landscapes were like dust clouds. He existed in a kind of antiquity which one couldn’t reach through archaeology. He didn’t have a face, just a lot of pores.’

He made an idiotic overtaking, and I said ‘Watch the road!’. He asked if I wanted to have a piece of chocolate, he asked me to open the glove compartment, and I broke a piece for myself, and gave him a piece too, but he didn’t want it. ‘I never became particularly involved in this person’, he continued. ‘I was too unlike him. In the end I understood that that was what made him. I mean, the only thing he was was that he wasn’t me. He wasn’t even someone I wanted to be. He was completely lacking in meaning. He only turned seventeen, I mean I wrote him for seventeen years. Still he never lived. I didn’t even mourn him’. The taste of chocolate had disappeared from my mouth, to our right was a huge factory area, he turned towards me and asked if I was still listening.

‘I understood afterwards that the vagueness in his character was a shadow of the solidity of mine. Against his autism stood my block of stone. It is first when one’s being is completely secured, when one’s water is the lagoon’s, that one wants to play with one’s existence. When one lives a life that isn’t boring one gladly reads boring novels. One takes drugs to emerge from one’s seed-core, only to solidify one’s identity more strongly. The one who says he’s schizophrenic assumes that one of his selves can truly say that about the others. I told myself that there weren’t any truths, only different fictions. The World Spirit was only arbitrary interference between different particles. But when I said that a doctoral dissertation in mathematics and a collection of poems differ only in their rule-systems, it didn’t mean I no longer believed in simple addition. It meant nothing. That I presented my character as a body without soul, depended on me having a soul without a body’.

‘I did everything to become famous. Fame is the atom of public life. To be talked about, to become a concept. One wants to be loved in an abstract way, in the same way that one abstractly loves what one writes. The rock singer is loved the moment he appears on stage. But he is quickly forgotten. The author can be loved after his death, the philosopher a thousand years later. Today there’s no one who believes there will be anything left in a thousand years, that’s why there’s so few philosophers. In Greece people believed in posterity, that’s why one could speak of big things, today perhaps Aristotle would have been a variety artist. I wrote because I believed that the world looked as I described it. But I was alone in comprehending it. Much later people would realise I was right, the children would be forced to learn my name as homework. The truth that I felt within me, that burned immediately as I thought of it, was that there was no truth. In the same way as each new evening was a lightning flash, a quiet riddle, the future an enormous secret, what had happened was a swarm, a swarm without meaning. That we didn’t acknowledge it was just a way to say to ourselves that nothing had happened, that everything had just continued, and would continue its pleasant walk. But that I said it was only a way to say to myself that it really did continue by daring to say the opposite’. ‘Why did you stop writing then?’ I asked.

‘You’ll think I’m crazy’, he said. ‘But I’m sure you think that already, so it doesn’t matter. I was going to pay a visit to my oldest sister in Borlänge. It was in January this year. Fucking cold. It was an evening. She was turning forty the next day. It was seven, seven thirty. I called her when she had arrived, but no one answered. So I thought, I’ll go to the cinema then. The first screening had presumably already begun, so I went in to a café, drank a cup of coffee and looked in the local paper to see which films were screening, where and when. Among other things a classic American romantic drama was showing which I thought I hadn’t seen. I was almost alone in the cinema. The film was black and white. I like black and white films. Just before the film ends one sees how the hero and heroine part. She leaves him in a white limousine. He goes alone towards the camera. It rains. I see how a man comes down a stair in an adjacent house. It is me. I am completely certain. The hero comes to me and asks for a cigarette. I take one out from my jacket and light it for him. Then a sign appears with The End. The rest of the audience walks out. I wait until I’m alone in the screening room before I dare to emerge. I checked in to a hotel and went already the next day back to Malmö, where I lived. I went in to the flat, brought out all the typewritten sheets I found, and burned them. I collected all the ashes and threw them out of the window, when the flakes had floated sufficiently far down they looked like small birds around disposed bread’.

‘Have you understood anything of what I’ve told you’, he asked. ‘Of course’, I said, ‘I’ve understood everything’. ‘If you’d really understood it all you’d ask me to get out of the car’. I looked straight out into the dark and said: ‘You say that only to make your story stranger. To me you’re just a man in a Volkswagen’.