18 Sep The Body and the Text: Critical storytelling, autotheory, and sexual abuse
In 2017, the Swedish Academy – until then known primarily for the Nobel prize and a rather conservative agenda – was rocked by a scandal in the wake of the #metoo movement. Not only the Academy, but a large part of the literary elite in Sweden became involved in a long and complicated exchange of stories that came to mark the coming years. From an international perspective, the most important result may have been the fact that there was no Nobel prize in literature awarded in 2018. For literature in Sweden, however, the influence came to be intense and persistent: diaries, essays, poetry, novels, and other forms of writing all focused on one abusive man whose behavior came to represent an entire community.
This autumn, seven years after the stories of abuse started to spread, a new book by one of the victims has just been published. In an interview in Dagens Nyheter, the author Anna-Karin Sellberg – who is also a researcher – describes how the abuse turned her into “just a body” in an academic world where there is usually “only a big head”.
This reminds me of one of the stories in the volume Critical Storytelling: Experiences of Power Abuse in Academia: a professor in a university language class had singled out one student’s gender in a grammar exercise; the only female student in the classroom, she felt as if she had suddenly been reduced to a body: “I tried to understand how this sentence, a sentence that commented a woman’s body in sexual terms, could be about me. I was not a body? I was a student.” (Chapter 21, “Panic Button”). This reaction reflects well the kind of incorporeal academia that Anna-Karin Sellberg describes: a place where there are not really supposed to be any bodies, only minds. This outdated but persistent attitude might well explain why #metoo never quite took off in Swedish academia – we simply deny the problems that still mark our work environment.
The Critical Storytelling volume was not primarily about sexual abuse, but about power abuse in academia in general. A new book in our series Studia Graeca Upsaliensia offers a continuation of similar ideas but with a particular focus on sexual violence and in the form of autotheory: Can an Object Love? A philological essay on female subjectivity. The author Ellen Söderblom Saarela intertwines her own embodied experience with reflections on ancient and medieval narratives and modern gender theory, thus taking the reader on an emotional and intellectual journey through time from antiquity to Mariah Carey and to those dramatic weeks in Stockholm and the Swedish Academy in the autumn of 2017.
I asked Adam Goldwyn, who is on the editorial board of the series, to engage in a discussion with Ellen as a way of presenting the book to a wider audience interested in stories and discourses, but also to anyone who feels the need to engage in alternative ways of academic writing. Ellen’s book certainly tells several sad stories, but her own story as it comes across in the following is both empowering and inspiring.
Adam: In Can an Object Love? you describe an intensely personal experience of intimate partner violence and how it reshapes your worldview, consciousness, sense of self, and almost everything else about how you perceive yourself and the world around you. But campus sexual abuse has been a scourge at universities around the world; obviously your book takes place in Sweden, but according to RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), one of the largest anti-sexual violence organizations in the United States, “sexual violence is pervasive on [college and university] campuses” here as well. As I was reading your book, I kept thinking of the old feminist motto that “the personal is political”; do you think that holds true for your book? Do you think of it is a personal text or a political text or how do you see those two strands working together? Do you see your book as part of a broader discourse about campus culture? What was your motivation to tell your story at book-length? Was it purely personal or did you feel some broader political or cultural responsibility for giving voice to the tens of thousands of others who have also experienced intimate partner violence in university environments and the countless more who experience it in other contexts?
Ellen: First of all, I appreciate that you place my book in a broader context in this way. As I wrote it, my intention was not to place it in a broader discourse about campus culture per se, although I do see how it can be read with it as a backdrop. However, the purely personal has never been the importance of the “message” of the book (if one could speak of such). Having tried to pursue writing for a long time according to traditional form, norms and ideals, I experienced an increasing alienation between what I wanted to formulate, and the practice of writing. To me, the contrast between my lived (female) experience and writing as I knew it increased and became all the more urgent the more I kept writing. The feeling of not being able to speak freely about anything – neither in academia nor regarding social questions more broadly – grew to become an internal issue for me, and I struggled greatly with feelings of alienation. I didn’t have the language to fully speak according to the familiar and expected formulae. As if, in some sense, I was indeed excluded from language. With this experience, an alienating sense of irrelevance increased; philology and literary theory, which had been my passion for so many years, gradually lost its meaning. As did the political discourse, which all the more appeared as made for the mere conversation and expected reactions, rather than saying anything that mattered.
When I finally decided to allow myself to enter the text, I allowed myself to write my perspectives on literature, culture and politics without conforming to the expected form. Finally, I had reconnected to the practice of writing. I felt that I finally had words for my thoughts and analyses. To me, the personal has never been an objective in itself, but rather, I learned that I needed it in order to say the things which I found resonated with broader issues. I keep returning to that passage in Simone de Beauvoir’s introduction to The Second Sex, where in a discussion with a man she is told that she says what she says only because she is a woman, and she finds herself in a kind of dilemma, since, would she answer that she says what she says because it’s the truth, she would agree to the man’s premise and detach her utterance from her female self as a speaking subject. As I tried to write without acknowledging my corporeal knowledge, or perhaps rather, by detaching my text from myself and my body as a writer of the words, I experienced how, with this detachment, I could only say half of what I wanted. Only by including myself in the writing, I could speak truthfully for the first time in many years.
By writing in such a personal form I would for once be able to relate to bigger, more abstract, matters, both political and literary. The personal was essential for the political to me, there was no way around it. It was the cure to my alienation. Adding to that, the mere practice of writing from the view of the objectified was important for me as I tried to figure out a way to understand subjectivity as mingled with the experience of objectification. The text is in some sense a response to a dominating voice that speaks from the safety of pureness and self-assurance, whereas I felt a need to speak from a more uncertain, insecure place. I couldn’t help but feel or believe, that the subjective position could resonate in others. That the personal would, rather than exclude relatability, include others. That was the hope, anyway. And in a text that aims at formulating a political discussion, resonance is a quite meaningful thing. Form is the content and vice versa, there simply was no other way for me to write that text – something I know after having tried a million times…
Finally, I did see myself as privileged who could indeed publish my book. Maybe others have experienced similar things as those written down, but find it more practically difficult to speak up about them. Would they like the book, I’d be more than happy. Who cares about any of the other stuff, really.
Adam: As a philologist, one of the aspects of your book that I found most fascinating was the way it speaks to twenty-first century modes of media consumption, by which I mean that the internet especially has made all things, from all times, from all places, available now. Yours is the first book I think to really investigate what that looks like as a stream of consciousness. I mean, you begin with an epigraph from Lucian, then from Beyoncé, and along the way you discuss the Sibyl of Cumae and Oprah, Christine de Pisan, and Hélène Cixous, and so many others. I found, for instance, the chapter “Post-Graduate” to be a revelation in comparing the ancient Greek novel Callirhoe to The Meaning of Mariah Carey and your analysis of her album Butterfly. As scholars, we think in terms of historicizing a text and understanding it in its original context, but in Can an Object Love? all these distinctions collapse and I think you show how texts still move people by being integrated into their own experience. What do time and history and geography and language mean in a globalized culture and how do you think that shapes both your understanding of your own experience and how you narrate that experience through the representational medium of writing?
Ellen: First of all, thank you so much for your kind words about my book. The thing is that this book came to be in a truly organic fashion. Text is so omnipresent in every moment of our lives; obviously during (scholarly) work, but also in how we consume literature (another obvious one, I know), news, and often leisure more broadly, as well as it is how we largely keep in touch with our friends, colleagues, perhaps family, etc. It’s how we consume and formulate our thoughts and impressions. We consume letters all the time.
Perhaps my book can be seen as a consequence of this phenomenon in our time, I don’t know? Text is woven together from all aspects of our lives. To me, it made perfect sense that both Callirhoe’s lament in her grave, and Mariah Carey’s narrating of her crises could tell me something true about my own life. I don’t know if this makes my way of consuming text an example of contemporary reading, or if it’s universal.Nevertheless, it reminds me of medieval authors’ ways of incorporating references, quotations, and forms from other sources, into their own works. For example, Anna Komnene’s way of writing in dialogue with ancient novels, or why not Jean de Meun’s choice to continue the Romance of the Rose as a way to narrate and discuss his matters. Maybe the associative aspect of CAOL is very tied to our time and media consumption, or maybe it takes inspiration from the dialogic nature of medieval literature (and other). Maybe time is cyclical rather than progressive.
In regard to the meaning of time, history, geography, and language in a globalized culture, and how it shapes my understanding of my experiences as well as how I narrate it, I do believe that texts tell us different things every time we read them. While processing things in my life, I couldn’t escape the feeling of the sources getting a pulse, speaking of something that I felt that I understood underneath my skin, while at the same time I experienced an increasing sense of alienation towards dealing with these texts. I tried to fight this alienation for years. I struggled to stay within a discourse that demands the author to remain invisible, and don’t get me wrong: I esteem traditional academic form. I have great respect for it and the work behind it. But I felt as though my hands were tied. For the first time, the sources meant something to me on quite an existential level. Literature was meaningful in an urgently important way, and at the same time I couldn’t write about it in full, which made the whole practice feel irrelevant.
I don’t want to make it appear as if contextualization of literature isn’t important in reading and interpreting it. But maybe there is something to ideas of gendered corporeal experiences and embodied subjectivity that letters can only capture to some extent. Maybe, studying courtly romance from its occasional aspect, dialogic nature and multiple readers, i.e. from its context and material conditions, it opens us up to ways of entering and understanding it that at once makes the distance between us and it larger (perhaps too large to beat), and smaller, making the work relatable on a more intimate level.
I truthfully cannot explain it in other words than that I felt that feminist theory that I had read, about phallocentric language and female exclusion from discourse, was a concrete thing. French feminism, as it were, helped me understand and find language for this alienating experience that I suffered in relation to language, at the same time as I experienced that the literary sources, the historical objects under investigation, were brought to life. Is it this relation of contrasts that Anna Komnene depicts as she trembles faced with literature, only to see her mother read it unapologetically? I don’t know.
Adam: You’re a specialist in comparative medieval literature, so it makes sense that you would consider your own situation through these texts you have spent so many years studying, but I am curious if the ancient or medieval texts were able to say something that, for instance, Lemonade or Malabou or the other more contemporary (and thus, seemingly perhaps more obviously relevant) texts could not? Would you say women’s experiences of gender-based oppression and sexual violence change across time or are there some constants? Can women’s experiences be discussed across such vast expanses of time and space, as well as language, literary conventions, and other narratological or representational traditions?
Ellen: This is a big question that I’m not sure I can give a satisfactory answer to here and now (or at all…), but I’ll give it a shot. I wrote my doctoral thesis on the twelfth century Old French anonymous romance Partonopeu de Blois, a very complicated text in general, but there was one specific part of it that I simply couldn’t let go, namely the way in which the knight (and main character) Partonopeu and his romantic interest, empress Melior, have their first encounter, which results in intercourse. This scene is a re-write of the myth of Amor and Psyche. The scene is awkward – a word also used in scholarship, which, I think, reflects the difficulty to pin it down – as it is in fact a depiction of rape. The two meet in a dark bedroom and Partonopeu ends up raping Melior despite her protests. After this, however, she tells him that she in fact had arranged for their meeting to take place. Apparently, Melior had planned for this to happen, which sheds new light on the rape that has just been narrated to us (audience or readers). It can be easy, thus, to simply state the scenario as forming part of classic misogynist tradition, according to which women trick and play games with men and seduce them. Partonopeu is young, a mere teenager, inexperienced and naïve faced with the seductive mastermind, as it were. However, to me this interpretation was hard to swallow, as it didn’t quite add up with how Melior was narrated more generally. Rather, she is humanized – a woman in love stuck under conditions that she must marry to rule her empire. Melior is more than a misogynistic stereotype, placed in the narrative as an instrument for a male character’s development and quest after what would then be deemed an acceptable mate according to the expectations. Rather, she is both the experienced seductress and the innocent virgin, so to speak.
Now, how does that relate to your question? Well, I thought that the only way to explain such a multifaceted character was by analyzing the way in which the romance (by use of literary references to the Greek novel tradition) makes Melior a female subject who finds strategies to pursue her own desire and to act according to her own political interests. How else would such a female character be depicted in a courtly romance? So, she indeed arranged for the awkward rape to occur. However, the scene remains difficult to pin down. Not only does Partonopeu lose his virginity during that occasion, but so does she. And the scene shifts its focalization between him and her. Melior is depicted as indeed experiencing the event as a vulnerable part who is overcome by a man who chooses to not adhere to her protests. As mentioned, she is a seductress and virgin at once, two stereotypes mingled into one complex character. To simply state that she isn’t affected by Partonopeu’s actions would be to not tell the whole story, I’d say.
My point is that this text is a complicated case of sexual violence in courtly literature. So, what can it say about our time and our lives? Maybe very little, if anything. Or, maybe the use of intertext, literary tradition and ways of adapting it to contemporary courtly culture, is just one way of a million in literary history to portray something as painful, difficult and tricky as sexual violence. The scene itself is graphic and long. It’s, well, awkward, to say the least. Given the way its narrated, given Partonopeu’s gradual development to increasingly embody the role of the perpetrator, as well as Melior’s reactions, protests and helplessness, all in detail, combined with the scene’s aftermath and Melior’s recapture of power in their dynamic, create a medieval narrative of the complexity of gendered power struggles, desire, reciprocity vs. violence, vulnerability and consent (or lack thereof). Wrapped in a courtly, exotic setting (Byzantium), formed by intertexts from different linguistic and genre traditions, shaped within a courtly poetic form, when it all comes down to it, Partonopeu de Blois can be said to represent issues that have been dealt with before this romance, as well as long after it, all the way into our time. It’s not providing us with an answer to end all questions of equality between the sexes. It’s difficult to adapt it to our ways of speaking of desire and rape. Yet, still, it can be viewed as narrating experiences that continue to be narrated to this day.
I believe that women’s experiences, thus, can be discussed across vast expanses of time, space, language, literary conventions etc. I do not, however, expect every work to conform to my idea of such experiences, or my life for that matter. The work lies in the reader as much as in the literary product. A romance doesn’t provide me with a service, rather it offers a handle to a door that I must open myself.
Adam: Can an Object Love? is also a meditation on two different kinds of knowledge, book-knowledge and experiential knowledge. You describe taking your course on the representation of love in Plato and then, in the next paragraph, “Violence is very educational. A 7.5-credit course in the philosophy of love. I passed the course. I learned to mute my expectations, what violence was, and that I was someone you could hit” (25). There is a critique, I think, in the book of the dispassionate nature of academic study which offers no real-world connection, that despite all your reading and knowledge, you were unprepared to experience something quite similar to what you had read about a thousand time (in the Aeneid, in Callirhoe, in Parthenopeu, in Lemonade, and so on). And yet although these texts didn’t protect you from that experience, so to speak, they form a constant intertext that enabled you to interpret and make sense of that experience. So, is there a critique of academic ways of reading? Can reading empower? Can it help us interpret or recover from traumatic events? What is the role of reading, and what is the role of academic reading? Has it changed the way you think about or teach these texts to your own students?
Ellen: I really appreciate this question and your reading of my text, because I indeed wanted to portray this experience of alienation towards academic study as well as the sources’ way of making sense of my own life. In some trivial way, I kind of felt it as if the sources became my friends while the academic setting became the antagonist who didn’t see them in the way I did. I say this with humor, of course… But, while it’s true as you formulate it: these texts couldn’t protect me in my own life, they did turn up as guides when I needed them to make sense of it all and find a way back to stability. In that way, they were a true comfort, also in moments when I felt that it was hard to find it around me beyond the world of letters. They didn’t give me answers per se, but they reflected emotions with which I dealt, and questions with which I struggled. In that way, I’d definitely say that reading have the ability to empower, not so much in their way to provide solutions and answers to the reader, but to reflect confusion, pain and searching. It offers community and dialogue, rather than a monological lecture based on hierarchy. In that way I suppose my way of thinking about them have changed, or, rather I’d say that their relevance and importance through time has manifested itself in moments of absolute urgency.
Adam: Your book offers a critique of academia, suggesting a kind of uselessness, irrelevance, or ignorance of reality in how texts are taught and how courses are evaluated; for instance, your opening discussion of your essay on love in Plato shows how the professor offered a detailed analysis of that theme that yet had nothing to do with your own actual experience. You wrote a final exam but say in your book, “I haven’t kept my examination paper. I guess it’s for the best. That paper had nothing to offer the world” (24). When discussing the pervasive “death of the humanities” as a field of academic study, it is often pointed out that more books are being written and sold and read than at any point in human history, and yet university enrollments tell us that students don’t find that academics talk about books in a sufficiently compelling way to get them in their classes. Is this purely an economic issue about future job prospects, or does the way we teach and talk about books make vital texts seem like dead and lifeless things with no personal connection to the lives of students?
Ellen: You pose great questions to which I’m not sure I can provide good answers, but from my personal experience I’d say that one can indeed sense a gap between text and life, if you will. The career model is obviously in part built on manufacturing this gap; merit is largely analyzed through one’s number of publications, which encourages publishing as a goal in itself. Formulations are standardized and ultimately formed to reply to other standardized formulations, I suppose, and risk isolating academic discourse into internal conversations that don’t speak to greater audiences. That’s quite a categorical accusation against academic discourse and doesn’t hold for every case, of course. But it can be said to relate to the situation you mention, where there have never been as many books written and sold, and still this isn’t reflected in the university enrollments. However, if I may get into my own personal view on this again… my experience is that I wasn’t very well-read in the classics or so when I started studying at the university. I had other interests, personally, when I enrolled as a student, than digging deep down into literary history. For me, what awoke my passion for these sources was studying language through close readings. This was how history became alive to me. But that’s hard to sell, maybe. I believe that I try to depict that reading experience in the book, that these texts may speak to us all, not unlike a song we like, or a think-piece in the paper, or a novel from last year, if we just read them. Christine de Pizan depicts the experience of how texts can grab you by the shoulders and cling on, and that that’s not always pleasant; in The Book of the City of Ladies we read how she sinks down on her chair as she is faced with yet another misogynist book. Literature weighs her down, tradition is getting under her skin – until she fashions a way to make it relevant to her own life and sense of self. As she re-evaluates sources from the past, she finds fates and female figures from which she can draw inspiration and courage in her own life, and rise back up with new confidence. I guess we cannot be told by standardized academic phrasings that these texts are important, we need to feel it under our own skin.
Adam: Relatively early in the book, you write: “There was no narrative under which I could take cover. […] All these words, spread in all those forms and genres. All these threads, all these documents, together they formed one big mess and that mess was me. My I was dissolved into an unbounded mass. I was fragments without structure. I was so far from whole. A narrative? Looking back, the thought of it makes me smile. If only. I was an overthrown bundle of leaves. I was passages of words and sentences that lacked their narrative, that lacked something that they had never owned” (35-36). At the end, you write “In uncertainty I write my self. And yet, I seek for my trace. Maybe this text is a narrative whose only coherence is its never-ending risk of dissolution. I’m a pile of paragraphs, out-scattered words. Carefully, in a row, I lay out my fragmented self” (211). So this is as much a book about the power of writing as about the effects of reading. What is it about narrative that was so important? What is the difference between “an unbounded mass” and “fragments” on the one hand and “narrative” and “structure” on the other? Why was it so important to create a narrative out of your experience?
Ellen: From a mere structuralist view, a narrative has its components that conduct a tale forward. I have always found Greimas’ actantial model useful in analyzing narratives, actually. I think that often the model stands and proves to be useful (albeit I guess many would disagree). Narratives come with certain expectations, which doesn’t mean that they are predictable or boring. They move forward, they want to get to a denouement, a case closed. And this can also be applied to subjectivity, right? Malabou’s depiction of a stream that follows its course: the movement ahead, towards something which we envision and reach for, in fact this reach itself is what makes us subjects, it is what makes us understand our selves.
To experience crisis was, for me, to not see that movement ahead. Rather, it was a sense of being stuck in one place. It was stagnation, not progress. And as I found myself outside of this sense of following a stream, I couldn’t make any sense of my self or my place in the world. Outside the sense of my life as pursuing a narrative, if you will, the omnipresent actantial models in different shapes and forms became all the more clear. Political discourse was all about storytelling, in some sense; a compilation of stories from a collective of voices, articulated mainly on social media, only to be fashioned into a narrative in more established medial forms. Feminist activism was phrased as a story to consume. It became a narrative with a purpose and its different actors. I think that for me, the idea of narratives suddenly appeared false and deceiving. Furthermore, the roles didn’t quite add up. Who was the subject in this model? What was the object, the goal? Who was the sender, subject and helper? As I, in my own little way, analyzed the actantial model of political discourse I found a discrepancy between the stream depicted, and the swamp that it actually was.
To create a narrative was urgent and important to me, as it was a way to formulate the need for understanding myself as a subject. I needed to progress forward, reach towards something, as I always had. But I couldn’t, I couldn’t see ahead. I was stuck, unable to make sense of my self without any power to reach forward, as it were. Without an object, I wasn’t a subject. I wanted to create a narrative because it was the only way I could formulate a need to see myself in a past but familiar normality. However, only after having subjected myself to the inability to paint a story out of my life could I find a connection with texts again, and so I reached a truer understanding of my self and the uncertainty of existence that I struggled with. The narrative was indeed depicted for me to consume, but it wasn’t the actantial model relevant to me. In that way, the idea of a comfortable narrative to define me and my place in the world appeared as political, bourgeois – I was expected to apply a helping role in the quest for light as it was defined above me, but my own life had a completely different structure, me as a subject had other objectives, senders and receivers. The irony of my text is, I guess, that although I go on and on about not having a narrative, the text does indeed follow a progressive pattern towards some sense of resolution. You have the critical event, the fall to the bottom, followed by the search for sanity and a kind of denouement (dramaturgically speaking). So, I guess it may be unavoidable to escape a narratorial existence, in some sense. Greimas’ model still stands, but the actors’ model is never given, stable, but on the contrary, it’s at constant risk of decadence.
Adam: The opening lines of the book: “I’m waiting for the subway. It’s spring 2018.” That was more than six years ago now. What do you see, looking back, in terms of both the political or cultural situation you describe in Sweden and the larger #metoo movement and in terms of thinking about your own past and present six years later? In terms of narrative and structure, does the narrative that you found for yourself in Can an Object Love? still seem like a fit now, or has time changed that narrative?
Ellen: In political terms, things have definitely changed. Speaking of narratives, a predictable feminist backlash has indeed occurred. In Sweden, of the #metoo movement we rarely see anything if not that women who testified back then have since been suffering bad consequences. In general, people speak of the #metoo era as something negative, as a time of collective hysteria. It’s a clear case of how the narrative has shifted; the former hero is now a villain, the former opponent is now a subject, etc. The change illustrates the dangers of uncritically buying into a given story. This backlash coincides with a far-right dominant discourse more generally. We’re really experiencing horrible times, to be honest. So, the euphoria of the #metoo movement that I write about in the book is definitely gone now. I know I was critical back then, but what was to come appeared way worse, I have to admit.
Coincidentally, that time seems far away now also on a personal level. Maybe that’s the only way for one’s narrative to keep floating ahead. Only by letting oneself float on, eyes closed, ears under the surface, can one keep follow that course that keeps our senses of self and our roads ahead intact and free from question or conflict. Only by confiding the confusion inside a corner somewhere, hidden beneath the skin. Only by letting it transform into oblivion. Dutifully we keep on floating, and I guess that’s fine. Until we hear that song again that once filled us with affect, or until we see that political speech that grasps us where we stand. Or, until we read that thousand-year-old text as we sit by our desks, and we feel how it may either drag us further down, or, that it shakes us wide awake from that same slumber that moved us ahead without friction just a moment ago. It awakens our pulse, making us question everything we thought we knew.
