Monstrous Subjectivity in P. O. Enquist’s Nedstörtad ängel 1985

Introduction

In the introduction to her book on the posthuman condition, the feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti sketches the excluding, uncertain, and ever-changing outline of the “human”:

Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that. Some of us are not even considered fully human now, let alone at previous moments of Western social, political and scientific history. Not if by ‘human’ we mean that creature familiar to us from the Enlightenment and its legacy.

(Braidotti 2013, 1)

The problematic question of the human forms a background as well as an ethical incentive for post-humanist attempts to think beyond the confining contours of the human. It can also be discerned in the writings of the Swedish author Per Olov Enquist.¹ With shifting intensity, the question of what a human being is recurs throughout his literary production, which by now stretches over more than half a century, including novels, dramas, essays, short stories, and children’s books. In his 1985 novel, Nedstörtad ängel (2005; Downfall: A Love Story 1990), the severity and complexity with which the question is brought to the fore gives it a particular sense of acuteness.² In the novel, Enquist turns to the monstrous in his exploration of the human. The reading that follows focuses on the critical and creative potential of this move by means of an analysis of one of the novel’s key figures—the two-headed monster Pasqual Pinon.

Like most of Enquist’s characters, Pinon is a historical person caught and re-thought in the author’s imagination. The real life Pinon was a poor laborer who was recruited into a freak show where he became known as “The Two-Headed Mexican.” His second head was a fake, but it made him a tremendous attraction during tours around the United States in the beginning of the twentieth century (Bogdan 1990, 84–5). In Nedstörtad ängel, Enquist narrates a rather self-willed version of Pinon’s life where his second head is described as a person of its own, a woman called Maria. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the depiction of Pasqual and Maria and the role they have in the novel’s struggle with the problem of what is, and what should be, thought of as human. In terms of theory, I will be drawing on feminist posthumanism and its strategy of rethinking subjectivity through the use of so-called “figurations,” combined with the theorization of monstrosity developed in teratology. More closely, I strive to visualize the figuration of subjectivity that can be discerned in the monstrous corporeality of Pasqual and Maria—thus undermining a view of subjectivity based on an excluding demand for sameness, and providing an alternative vision of the subject. In extension, this case study is an attempt to shed light on Enquist’s intricate use of the category of character and its ethical implications.³

Enquist’s relationship to postmodernism and its undercurrents is complex. This is shown, for example, by Susan Brantly in her article on postmodernism in those novels by Enquist that deal with the Enlightenment (Brantly 2007, 319–42). In my reading, I do not wish to bury this complexity under the label of post-humanism. I use posthumanism as an analytical tool, not as a label. However, I agree with Brantly when she emphasizes Enquist’s critical eye for the workings of power as one of his most postmodern characteristics (Brantly 2007, 339). Post-humanism, in a feminist version, consequently provides me with the means to grasp the multifaceted interconnections between subjectivity and power depicted in the novel. Before I enter any deeper into these theories and into the questions I try to tackle through them, I shall give a brief introduction to Nedstörtad ängel and to some previous critics’ interpretations of the role and meaning of Pasqual and Maria.

Nedstörtad ängel is the shortest and most fragmentary and poetic of Enquist’s novels. A first-person narrator forms...