The Art of Self-Defense

Abstract

In his “On the Concept of History,” Walter Benjamin asks what memory can mean at “a moment of danger.” Suggesting that we all are at such a moment of danger today, I discuss what role and function literary memory can play or fulfill in an age marked by right-wing extremism, climate change, authoritarian governments, as that age in its complexity is represented in three contemporary, but different, Swedish literary diaries by Lars Norén, Ulf Lundell, and Åsa Linderborg. In these works, each author claims to have become homeless, and that the world surrounding the writing subject has become threatening, but also generating acts of remembrance of the past. The three writers construe differing subject positions to make memory possible. Memory can further be related to class and gender, and it can be divided into personal or subjective as well as cultural or social memories. Aiming to understand what their respective memory work entails, I discuss the diary as a “memory machine,” and what the social dangers that these writers risk confronting could mean, and whether literature in the form of diaries can turn into a defense against cumulative moments of danger. And what role does the act of forgetting play? The memory work in the three diaries seemingly focuses the individual in an act of self-representation, and one must further ask if these representations are also intended as a defense of self and subject.