Astrid Lindgren has been laid to rest

[pengolodh_sc]

Astrid Anna Emilia Lindgren died January 28th, after having lived her 
whole life and having said all she had to say.  The public funeral 
took place today, Friday March 8th, from Storkyrkan in Gamla Stan in 
Stockholm.  She will be laid to rest in a private ceremony in Småland.

Today I cried a little.



The following piece is written by Jørgen Gaare, and appeared in 
Aftenposten's online edition February 9th, 2002, and may be seen in 
its original version at 
http://www.aftenposten.no/meninger/kronikker/article.jhtml?
articleID=272718.  Unfortunately it is not presently available in 
English, and I therefore made the below translation.  

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Eating cherries with the small ones

"The snow lay in drives, and the winter day was desolate and cold, 
but over the garden wall a cherry-tree stretched in blossoming white 
branches"

Astrid Lindgren's border-breaking philosophy can bear comparison with 
Socrates, Plato, and Nietzsche.  Her analysis of the function of 
language, and her treatment of tabooed topics still shock habitual 
thinking, though her books have become common property, writes 
philosopher and publishing editor Jørgen Gaare.  In 2000, together 
with Øystein Sjaastad, he published the book "Pippi og Sokrates. 
Filosofiske vandringer i Astrid Lindgrens verden" ("Pippi and 
Socrates:  Philosophical strolls in the world of Astrid Lindgren").

With everyday topics such as earnestness, humour, and cherries Astrid 
Lindgren broke boundaries.  Not only did she dare to write to 
children about large, painful topics, about death, about anxiety and 
fears, about the evils.  She wrote contrary to the demands of 
contemporary taste and fashion, touched taboos, shocked the decent 
grown ups and wrote her way into the hearts of children everywhere.  
She has been published in issues so large that hardly anyone could 
dream to match – it would have to be Mao, God, or Harry Potter.  Her, 
in every sense, great authorship has delighted, amazed, amused, and 
comforted millions. 

Long before her death Astrid Lindgren was canonised – also in the 
sense that all her main works are part of the canon of children's 
literature.  But the universal embrace of her works comes at a 
price.  It tends to involve her text being perceived as harmless, 
that they no longer cause offence.  

There is ample reason to recall that her books several times reaped 
storm.  Her debut-book caused the Pippi-controversy, where she was 
accused of assaulting morale and public decency.  In the 70s the 
Marxists wrote her off as having a flawed view of classes.  And "The 
Brothers Lionheart" was strongly criticised for its ending:  Did it 
in fact encourage suicide? 

There is ample reason to remind that her books still will cause 
several shocks to habitual thinking.  Apparently so harmless, but 
with such provocative power:  She chose to eat her cherries with the 
small people.  

In Bullerby the cherry-tree grows in a highly earthly paradise, but 
the idyll has its discomforts.  The children complain of the dust 
that hurts their eyes, as they stand by the roadside selling 
berries.  Then the oldest lad Lars makes an existential choice: 
"Why do people say: "ych, how hot the sun shines" or "ugh, how loud 
the birds are singing," said Lars. Who decided that one should like 
it when the sun's shining, but not when it's dusty?  And then we made 
up our minds to like it when it was dusty. "
This "reappraisal of values" – completely by Nietzsche's recipe – is 
characteristic of Lindgren. Pippi, Karlsson-On-The-Roof and Emil each 
in their way rebel against stolidity and established truths. 

Emil and his tame pig also like cherries.  The more impossible it is 
to understand that mother Alma asks him to throw away a whole 
bucket!  It goes completely against all reason and frugality of 
Småland.  That the berries had been the raw materials for wine, Emil 
of course does not know, no more than he knows which disasters are 
fermenting within them.  All of Katthult and Vimmerby are put on 
their heads in what must be the most burlesque comedy of Lindgren's 
collected tricks.  The totallers come out in force, and Emil agrees 
to give the vow of total abstinence on condition that Piggy Beast, 
the drunken swine itself, does likewise.  

The tame pig, the pet pig, is in itself a threat to the orderliness 
of the farmer society.  But now a new revolution takes place.  In 
power of its vow, the pig becomes a responsible individual.  Emil's 
utility-maximising tightwad of a father grudgingly has to admit:  One 
does not slaughter a totaller.  

The collection Sunnaneng from 1959 contains Lindgren's most beautiful 
and wistful stories.  The Cherry-tree which stretches itself across 
the garden wall, marks the border to the other side, to 
the "Sunnaneng of the eternal spring" where the lost children find 
light and joy and life and a mother that calls "Come, all my 
children!"  It marks the founding motive in her authorship:  the care 
for children who suffer, who have their childhood stolen away.  The 
cherry-tree foretells of the idyllic Cherryvale in Nangijala, where 
the brothers Lionheart come after their death.  Comforting for many – 
offensive to a few. 

Astrid Lindgren is a writer who breaks boundaries.  She has a 
register and a span of reflection far greater than that fond in the 
majority of lauded literature for grown ups.  She simply does it so 
easily!  The children in her books philosophise over the small and 
great paradoxes of life.  They wonder about life, worry about death, 
fight evil, long for death.  They wonder why there are stinging 
nettles, or if only real princesses can make a prince out of a frog 
simply by a kiss.  And they question language.  They want to know the 
meaning of words and the nature of things.  

Words can deceive.  Cherries aren't always merely cherries, as Emil 
came to experience.  The basic insight of linguistic philosophy – 
that there is a difference between the word and the object – we also 
learn from the opening words of the second book about Emil:

"Do you know now who lived at Katthult?  It was Emil's father, who 
was called Anton, and Emil's mother, who was called Alma, Emil's 
sister who was called Ida, the farmhand, who was called Alfred, the 
serving lass, who was called Lina, and then there was Emil, who was 
called Emil. "

Mrs. Nilson says it with exquisite naïveté in one of the books about 
Meg (Marikken):  "That'em can see stars, that's one thing.  But 
how'em can see what'em are called, I never can understand." 

At the same time Lindgren is very conscious of the magical, invoking 
sides of words.  Naive or not, for a mythic and childish 
consciousness, the word is the thing.  Only the name of Sir Kato is 
mentioned, all living things shiver in fright, and little birds fall 
dead to the ground.  

The giver of names has power over the things:

"Listen now, wild horses," Birk cried. "Now we have given you names.  
Rascal and Madcap are your names, and now you belong to us, whether 
you want to or not."

Who is the original giver of names that put words on all things? 
Plato asks in the dialogue Kratylos.  "I wonder who found out what 
all the words mean," Tommy chimes in, after Pippi has invented a 
brand spanking new word (obviously inspired by the hero of Lindgren's 
favourite novel, Hunger by Knut Hamsun). 

What ties the meaning of the word to the letter of the word?  Is the 
connection necessary and natural – or incidental and culturally 
dictated?  Wittgenstein has formed a school by looking at the meaning 
as a function of its use, tied to practical plays with "language".  
Pippi's language-philosophical examination is behind neither in 
fantasy nor analytical prowess, as she methodically goes to work to 
find out what her new word spunk means.  She denounces (as does 
Plato) the onomatopoeia-theory.  Then she alternately tries to listen 
her way into the word for hints (like Heidegger) and test it in 
arranged plays with words (like Wittgenstein). 

When she finally finds the spunk, a shiny-green dung beetle shining 
in all its spunklikeness, there can be no doubt that she at the same 
time recognises it as a scarab. We know that she has done thorough 
field-studies: "Have I been to Egypt!  Oh, you can betcha I have."  
Of course she recognises the most widely spread holy amulet of the 
entire Egyptian high culture.  The Scarab was the beetle which rolled 
the ball of dung, and the beetle-god which rolled the sun-disk.  The 
Scarab was the mystery of creation and rebirth itself.  

It is more dubious whether Pippi was aware of the English meaning of 
the word spunk.  Besides such interpretations as courage, zest, 
mettle, spirit – highly fitting in regards to Pippi – it is also a 
vulgar slang-word for sperm or seed.  But also that gives meaning.  
The sower went out to sow his seed, as it says in the gospel, and the 
seed is the word.  In the English translations the seed is most 
decidedly not the word.  Here Pippi's word is called spink.  What at 
once is dirty and holy, is taboo.  Dung beetle and Scarab.  
Disgusting and life-giving seed.  Hair and bodily secretions and 
other ambiguous substances which are unmentionable, dangerous, 
powerful. 

The outcry following Pippi Longstocking shows how society is ready to 
go on alert when taboos are broken and the social order is 
threatened.  Pippi was a fleck of shame on the pure, pretty post-war 
Sweden, a speck of dirt which should have been washed away.  Pippi 
was Taboo personified.  She was unprecedented.  Worried educators and 
parents characterised her and the book as unwholesome, unnatural, 
distasteful, abnormal, reckless, alarming, morbid, even insane.  

Dirt is not dirty in and of itself, but in relations to an 
established order.  As William James says it: Dirt is matter out of 
place.  Anthropologists Edmund Leach and Mary Douglas have created 
the school for this symbolic understanding of uncleanliness and 
taboo.  They would have benefited from fieldwork in Villa 
Villekulla.  Thus writes "Indignant" in Aftonbladet after having 
heard the book read on radio in 1946:

"And what to say bout where we are told that she has a garter and a 
old piece of hardtack in her breadbox, where she was looking for her 
hat, and on the hat shelf there is a piece of cheese, which makes her 
happy because she had been missing it!  Everything goes on in the 
same mind-boggling style.  I have heard tell that this "Pippi 
Longstocking" has received an award.  Is there nobody who can stop 
this demoralising radio-programme? "

"Indignant" finds comfort in how it is inconceivable how this 
rascal "may neither stir nor interest a healthy and well raised 
child".  Paradoxically, this menace must still be stopped, outlawed!  
These are the goals and means of the traditional way of raising 
children: through prohibition to tabooify the dirty, the ill-placed.  
Our cleanliness-rules are as much about mental hygiene as bodily 
hygiene.  It is about keeping our categories in order, by keeping out 
anything which causes confusion in the terms.  

Socrates was also raised to avoid dirt.  In Plato's dialogue 
Parmenides a very young Socrates appears as the defender of the 
concept of ideas – that the phenomena are the shadows if ideas.  But 
then the sly old fox Parmenides asks if this also is valid for "hair 
and dirt and aught else lowly and despicable ".  Socrates shies 
back:  "To assume an idea for those would, I am afraid, be too 
unheard of... Presented with this thought, I took to flight for fear 
of falling into an abyss of nonsense and go to waste." 

Purity-fanaticism has as known some gloomy offshoots – from fear of 
foreigners and discrimination to racial hygiene, ethnic cleansing and 
genocide.  Ronia's robberfather Mattis has had unwelcome "asylum-
seekers" enter the Mattis-castle and tries to do everything in his 
power to drive them out.  With Birk Borkason as his hostage he 
finally has the crowbar:

"Now Borka will go straight to Bloksberg faster than he lets go the 
first morning fart." 

But Ronia yells at him:

"Rob you can do, money and things and dirt and dung and whatever you 
like, but humans you can't rob, because then I won't be your daughter 
anymore.  " 

"Here's no talk of humans ", Mattis said, and his voice was not to 
recognise.  "I have captured a worm-spawn, a louse, a little stray 
dog, and I will finally get the castle of my fathers clean.  Then you 
may be my daughter or not, just as you like."

It is difficult to justify persecution of humans, but dirt and vermin 
should be cleaned out.  

Edmund Leach has promoted a theory about the role of the taboo for 
our linguistic perception of the world.  The tabooified is just the 
ambiguous, dirty and untidy which must be removed so the world may 
appear in understandable categories.  The taboo is the negatively 
acting force which removes the disturbing spaces between terms.  
Pippi's spunk is again a glorious example.  

Lindgren's treatment of taboos thus goes far deeper than a jolly fart 
every now and anon.  She has created a host of characters who in 
power of their at the same time potent and ambiguous position between 
terms, trigger the taboo. 

Pippi, Karlsson-On-The-Roof, Emil and Ronia the Robber's Daughter are 
such transcending, provocative figures which immediately cause a mess 
in the "natural" order of things.  The surrounding world reacts in 
programmatic fashion – with disgust and rejection, with correction 
and confinement.  But their mission is to promote a higher order: 
they are bridgebuilders between separate worlds, like Ronia across 
the Hell-gap.  

Pippi transcends the boundary, not with cherries, but with krumelure-
pills. She chooses in the most literal sense to eradicate adulthood.  
After all, it only consists of a heap of chores, and stupid clothes, 
and corns, and municipal taxes.  "Fine, little krumelur, help me so I 
shan't grow bug!" 

Big, you must mean, Tommy protests.  But no: "If I said bug, then I 
mean bug."  And then she proceeds to tell of a young boy in Rio who 
said big instead of bug, and grew old on the spot.  It is what one in 
linguistics calls "a difference that makes a difference", a minimal 
difference of maximal importance, just link between spunk and spink. 

We may conclude that the pills worked.  Pippi is as young today as 
when she was first written 50 years ago.  Likewise Astrid Lindgren – 
she never was in any rush to grow big.  But "bug" she is not.  
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Best regards
Christian Stubø