The Apocalypse of Scandinavian Social Democracy?: A Reading of Johan Harstad’s Novel Hässelby

Abstract

The Apocalypse of Scandinavian Social Democracy?A Reading of Johan Harstad’s Novel Hässelby Lars Rune Waage What happens when social democracy comes of age and is confronted by a new generation that does not recognize or identify with the notion of solidarity? As the young boy enters into adulthood, he questions both his father’s life as a social democrat and the idea of the welfare state. Finally, doubts about whether contemporary society can sustain itself lead to an apocalyptic conclusion. Since 1972, Gunilla Bergström has produced more than forty titles on a little short-haired boy known to Swedes as Alfons Åberg (Alfie Atkins in English translations; in Norwegian, Albert Åberg). From the time of that first publication, thousands of these books have been sold, and they have made an impressive impact on young readers. Virtually all children of Scandinavia know who Alfie Atkins is. The universe of Alfie Atkins is one of peace and tranquility. Living with his father in Stockholm, nothing much happens. He has two best friends, Victor and Milla, but his best friend of all is his father, Bertil. Many would agree that Alfie and his father are representatives of Scandinavian social democracy. Conflicts are resolved through discussion; father and son do not engage in argument, but always work together toward consensus. Although he is a single parent, Bertil has an extraordinary ability to show love and affection for his son, and together they can solve almost any problem. The son also takes great pleasure in carrying out his domestic duties. Bertil has all of the qualities of a Scandinavian social democrat: he lives in a small flat in Stockholm, he wears comfortable clothing, and he shows no sign—except for his [End Page 234] pipe—of conspicuous consumption. He believes in equality and that each and every member of society should partake in upholding it. The enclosed space of the flat is frequented by no adults other than Alfie’s grandmother. Alfie’s friends do visit occasionally. In short: father and son do their very best to acquire the Scandinavian “kos”—to enjoy cozy, peaceful, and domestic bliss. However, we might inquire, together with Johan Harstad, the Norwegian-born writer (b. 1979), about what happens when Alfie and Bertil grow older and as society develops. With his 2007 text, Johan Harstad sets out to produce an updated version of the books by Gunilla Bergström, and places father and son temporally in the mid-1980s and spatially in a suburb called Hässelby—which also is the name of the text. This raises a few questions: What is the correspondence between the text of Harstad and the texts of Bergström? Clearly, it is an intertextual relationship, but are there also textual connections in form and content? How does the “adult” text relate to the “childish” picture book—and is the former a reinterpretation of the latter? The adult text’s depictions of the Scandinavian family home are strongly intertwined with the question of form. Thus both its intertexual relationship to the original books on Alfie Atkins (regarding growing up in a single-parent home in Scandinavia) and the question of form (how this work presents itself as a novel) are of major importance. In this article, I shall focus on two main issues. First, I discuss what kind of text Hässelby is and how the gloom of the text corresponds to the form of the novel. Second, I investigate how Hässelby can be read as both an interpretation and a discussion of the ideology and perceived reality of the Swedish folk home (folkhemmet)1 and subsequently the welfare state. First and foremost, Harstad has been seen as a representative of the new “seriousness” in Norwegian literature (nyalvoret), that is, as a member of a generation of younger writers who leave the irony of [End Page 235] the 1990s behind. The literary critic Bernhard Ellefsen states that “den eksistensialistiske kritikken av kapitalismen og repressive mekanismer i storsamfunnet er det som først og fremst motiverer tekstene” (Ellefsen 2009, 24) [the existentialist critique of capitalism and the repressive mechanisms in society is what first and foremost motivates his texts]. His...