Stig Dagerman Blog

Dagerman’s second novel was written right before his journey to Germany in the fall of ’46.  Its structure is bursting at the seams with over-heated, hallucinatory imagery, the unfettered flow of which is unique in his production.  (Dagerman’s reporting from Germany signaled a turn toward more naturalistic, and to many readers, more accessible writing.)

It is a difficult book to read, writes Olof Lagercrantz, Dagerman’s biographer (1). Not because the novel is obscure or hard to understand – its structure is clear. The difficulty to him is the ratched-up tone or intensity. But when the reader’s senses adjust  “… a whole landscape opens up, and one to which he will often long back.”

Simply, the structure is this: Five men and two women are shipwrecked on a deserted island with a hostile environment. There’s no food, no water, no chance of rescue. The reader gets to know this shard of stranded humanity as each character’s life-story is told through the hallucinatory distortions caused by their thirst, hunger, wounded bodies and souls.  The second part of the novel, explores each character’s chosen path on the island in the face of the inevitability of death.

Island of the Doomed is very much a symbolic novel depicting the fearful state of mankind in the wake of the horrors of war, genocide and the entry into the nuclear age. Lagercrantz describes how Dagerman seems to serve as a medium for the anxiety of the times: “The 300 pages seem written in a trance-like state, the pen rarely leaving the paper, one dreamlike image after the other, and when the contact with the spirit world finally breaks, you imagine how the medium prints ‘fini’ on the last page without really knowing what has transpired.” Indeed, Stig Dagerman (the atheist!) told a friend that the novel was the most curious he’s ever written because “I didn’t think when I wrote it but let God do the writing”.

But it’s not only the post-war times that are reflected through this 23-yearold novelist, it is of course also his own complex psychological make-up.  There aren’t really seven different characters on the island, Lagercrantz argues, but one. They all carry variations on guilt, fear and loneliness, themes close to Dagerman’s own:                                                  - Jimmie Baaz/the once successful boxer paralyzed by the expectations put upon him;        - Madame/the guilt-ridden mother of a catatonic child whom she can’t love;                        - The English girl/who has been raped and fears men and intimacy;                                         – Tim Solider/ the ship-hand who can’t escape his sense of servitude and inferiority;         - Boy Larus/the soldier who subordinates his self to absurd obedience;                                 – Ca ptain Wilson/who withdraws into a cold heartless shell devoid of humanity; and     - Lucas Egmont/the one with a bleeding, guilt-ridden heart who desperately tries to find meaning in the meaningless.

Lagercrantz sees in Lucas Egmont a reflection of Dagerman’s idealistic self, and Egmont is indeed the only one who manages to find some sense of hope and transcendence before succumbing to his death on the island. The second part of the book describes his philosophical journey as he argues against his nemesis the humanoid Captain Wilson.

Dagerman serves as a medium for the postwar times, and that includes channeling its philosophical currents.  When God is dead and life lacks purpose, how do we live? Moreover, how do we live as humans? The perennial ethical problem.

Similar to Camus’ Sisyphus who endlessly pushes a rock up a mountain only to see it roll down again, Dagerman’s Egmont is the absurd hero who transcends his fate by infusing a symbolic act with meaning. As the last person left on the island,  aware that nobody will ever see it, Egmont carves into the white rock his image of a lion – a symbol for the power of solidarity among men not the killing-machine that Captain Wilson wanted.

“And the awareness, simply awareness, the open eyes that fearlessly observe their terrifying situation have to be the guiding star of the self, our only compass that stake out the direction, because without that compass there will no direction.” (p. 283, transl. LD)

Island of the Doomed is a both a document of an anxiety-filled time and an autobiography. “The strictly personal and intimate melded together with the general and all-concerning. It all came together in this book and that is why, Lagercrantz says, the force of life runs so strongly through its pages.” 

(1) Olof Lagercrantz, Stig Dagerman, Norstedts, Stockholm 1985

“As a bridge builder, I am fascinated by the solutions to three main problems:            First, there is the problem of connection. I hope to be able to break my own isolation by having one support secured within myself; the other will be found within those people to whom I turn for solace. Secondly, there is the problem of construction, to create the suspension, the artistic problem.  I want to test the powers of my talent. A talent that I am condemned to constantly question, except in those rare moments when I rise far above my own confusion and seem to gleam an arc, far more daring that I ever hoped for. Finally, there is the problem of the setting. I want to offer a panorama of a body of water, until now unknown, but one that I believe is worthy of a bird’s eye view. “                                - Stig Dagerman from Essäer och andra texter (translation by Lo Dagerman)

This credo of Dagerman’s opens Lotta  Lotass’ book about his writing (Freedom Conveyed, 2002). She writes: At the center of Dagerman’s aesthetics lie conveyance and communication. The concern is to communicate to the reader an attitude towards one’s own existence and towards the world at large. The challenge lies in connecting the text with the reader and, by means of an active dialogue, effect critical thinking and aware-ness of one’s own and others’ situation and to indicate ways to change it. The purpose of the communication, and which will decide its value, is its ability to change and liberate.

Dagerman’s yearning for liberation, initially in political terms then increasingly more of a psychological nature, drives him to write.  Striving to keep emotionally open and vulnerable as he creates,  Dagerman’s texts often bring him and the reader into complex, anxiety-ridden territory. This brought him many critics during his lifetime: not only was his writing not seen as being uplifting, supporting a striving toward happiness and harmony in sheltered postwar Sweden, but his texts were also perceived as difficult to understand.

Dagerman raged against this harmony-ideal and an unwillingness to look at the human condition in the wake of World War II:                                                                                                          “By understood you mean that a reader should be able to grasp it without any strain of thought, similarly to a piece of advertisement or a neon commercial. “                                “It has been shown, unfortunately, that quiet contentment has a certain tendency to degenerate into belching and over-eating. And in a world full of happiness-seeking belchers, the most important thing of all may be a sense of being torn apart and the ability to feel fear. That’s why I want to pull down all the chicken-wire put up around our fear, open up the gates for the snakes in the snake sanctuaries, and put broken glass in the bathtubs of all those who claim to have sought and found contentment, because theirs is a cruel occupation in a world where there are so many abandoned people. “                                - Stig Dagerman from The Snake

“There is nothing like it in Swedish literature. Its closest relative is Kafka or Camus.” Pontus Stenshall, Director, on Dagerman’s novel The Island of the Doomed

Moment Theater, located in the outskirts of Stockholm, recently had the world premiere of their staging of Dagerman’s The Island of the Doomed.  The performance is an interpretation and a reading and read-aloud and a bringing to life of Dagerman’s novel from 1946, as well as a coming to terms with and a conversation about parts of this daunting text. Four actors step in and out of the novel’s seven wayward characters who are stranded on a deserted island after a shipwreck. These character-shifts are indicated to us who watch, by the actors’ putting-on and taking-off the shoes of the different characters.

Director Pontus Stenshäll has sensitively responded to Dagerman’s offer to launch a dialogue – a conversation that with crushing certainty leads to the loneliness of man and the painful realization about how difficult it is to acquire a sense of personal freedom that doesn’t intrude on the freedom of others.

It is in one of the seven and seventy non-descript suburbs it will happen. The doomed seven crawl up onto an island in a sea of texts and talk to us for a while. At Moment Theater, we hear the calls of those seven individuals, who died in a novel sixty-two years ago, and we want to respond to them. Boy Larus. Madame. The Captain. Tim Solider. Lucas Egmont. The English girl. Jimmie Baaz. Those were the seven who died in the text and therefore can be revived time and time again to live among us who remain – and  who are still reading and listening.

Dagerman’s novel The Island of the Doomed describes seven stranded individuals who during a few endlessly short days and hours touch on, provoke and connect seven states-of-mind: The thirst of dawn; The paralysis of morning; The hunger of the day; The sorrow at sunset; The obedience of twilight; The longing of evening; and The fires of night.

These seven states-of-mind come together, not peacefully but to fight about what symbol or statement should be carved into the white rock – a rock that the seven shipwrecked find in the sand just before dehydration, hunger, heat and the lack of love will extinguish the last human life on the island. Lion or not a lion? A life and death struggle ensues about what Symbol to choose for the Arts or Meaning or Life or Truth or Existence, At the crossroads of questioning and listening, Dagerman poses the quandary about the road ahead.

The ensemble of Moment Theater responds to the author that they so very much want to understand and communicate the wealth they’ve found in the novel. In front of a full house, the actors discuss the text: how they enter into it, walk around and catch sight of its richness. The novel about the seven doomed individuals that has been called wild and crazy, modernistic, a difficult read and remarkable, becomes what I believe was Dagerman’s wish: a text to argue with and keep alive through re-readings, read-alouds, stagings and, who knows, maybe the time has come for a film version.

I can hear the actors at Moment Theater talking directly to the author:   You wrote this story in such a haste and with such energy and determination, happiness even. With seriousness AND humor. Although not many people have noticed the humor. We have laughed as we have cried at that which you wrote half a year or so after the end of WWII. You were sitting on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, in a writing hut infused with ghost of August Strindberg. We heard that you had to care for your oldest son who just had started to walk. As you became more and more engrossed in your writing, your son started to tear pieces of wallpaper off the wall until he lay parts of it bare exposing a surface that long ago had surrounded Strindberg. That is how they talk with each other: Authors who don’t live in the same time period. That’s how they talk with each other: Authors and actors and audience. Intense listening on-stage; rapt attention among the audience. Four actors in a sea of white balloons. Music. Improvisation. Read-alouds. Ecstatic outbursts! The four actors singing “Because” by the Beatles. Just because.

I’m tapping the keyboard to capture the feeling of having been right there, or now being here, in a conversation about how we should be able to civilize or train ourselves: to understand each other; to irritate each other without having to fight. Moment Theater doesn’t give us their interpretation of The Island of the Doomed to be admired or rejected. They are instead continuing an inquiry about how we should inhabit our place next to each other on earth. Keen listening, compassion and dialogue are what their performance is all about. Through all its pain, melancholy, grief and humor, their world premiere, just a week or so before Spring Equinox, offers hope. This hope is grounded in our joint vulnerability and universal thirst and longing for consolation. When we use the word “our” and start to engage our neighbor, our  “civilization” work has begun. Keeping each other company and our dialogue alive become possible islands for survival in stormy seas.

I  was much moved by the invitation to the island of the doomed in Stockholm, and rejoiced at hearing the beats of the world’s heart. In all his texts, in spite of his pessimism and difficulties, Dagerman offers a way out through dialogue. A timeless journey where words written down some fifty years ago are brought to life through the bodies and voices of four actors and enliven the room between them and us; and we who also quietly partake in the conversation, this evening in a drab suburb, experience a heightened sense of being alive.

We who are there have for some hours escaped our cages of loneliness. At the end of the evening: A mutual somewhat embarrassed longing, from this Stockholm outpost, to participate in the building of the World. Surely, Dagerman must have intended this text to be experienced on a chilly evening with the promise of Spring Equinox around the corner. The seven on the island who died and then were resurrected out of the sea of texts, will continue to live with us, to be our consolation through the thirst of dawn and the hunger of the day and the longing of evening.

“/…/Man’s fate is sealed everywhere and at all times, and one individual’s significance for another is immeasurable. I believe in the solidarity, the compassion and love as man’s last white shirts. Highest of all virtues, I put that form of love that is called forgiveness. I believe that man’s thirst for forgiveness is not possible to slake, not because of any sin of heavenly or devilish origin, but because we all from our very beginnings are confronted by a merciless state of the world that we can affect less than we wish./…/”

Quotation From “Do We Believe in Man?” 1950; Stig Dagerman, Essays and Texts, Norstedts, 1990

Bengt Soderhall

… and I don’t understand how to open it again.” October 20, 1954

We all have our masters. I am such a slave to my talent that I dare not use it for fear of discovering that it has been lost. I am such a slave to my reputation that I hardly dare write a line. When depression finally sets in, I become a slave to that as well. My greatest ambition becomes to hold on to it. My greatest desire becomes to feel that my only worth lies in that which I fear I have lost: the ability to squeeze beauty out of despair, anxiety and failings. In bitter exultation I long to see my house fall to ruins and myself snowed under, relegated to oblivion.

Depression is a room with seven windows. From the last of these I can view a knife, a razor, a vial of poison, an immeasurably deep pool, and the ledge of a tall building. Finally, I become a slave to these instruments of death. Or is it I who hound them? And I begin to think that suicide is the sole proof of human freedom.

But from a direction as yet impossible for me to pinpoint, the miracle of liberation draws near. What is the miracle? Simply: my realization that no power, and no person, has the right to make such demands on me that my desire for life disappears. For without that, what can exist?

A human life is not a performance but a growing into perfection. Like every other part of creation, man is an end in himself – resting like a stone in the sand.

From the essay Our Need for Consolation is Insatiable 1952

Stig died on November 4, 1954. He was 31.