Social Realism and the Paranormal in Scandinavian Popular Fiction

Olu Jenzen

University of Brighton

John Ajvide Lindqvist Let the Right One In 2004 Sara Elfgren and Mats Strandberg The Circle 2011

Still from Let the Right One In 2008

Key points from the paper:

The novels’ particular combination of witchcraft and psi abilities in The Circle and vampire lore in Let the Right One In – mixed with a distinctly realist tradition – makes these texts stand out as examples of an emerging new style of the popular paranormal.

Still from Let the Right One In 2008

The genre of social realism, has at its heart the idea of recording life on the social margins, foregrounding external structural factors that shape characters’ social lives.

Social realism has often been regarded as unfashionable, anachronistic and overly pious. My proposal here is that the merging of the paranormal and the social realist narrative provides the latter with a possibility to retain strong mimetic qualities, yet interrogate realism’s ideological gesture.

Both Let the Right One In and The Circle express a sentiment of disillusion with the ‘Swedish Model’, attending particularly to the gaps left by structural economical development and social engineering.

The trope of the paranormal is used to problematise understandings of social differences. The novels capture in great detail the subtle social hierarchies of the suburban high-rises of outside Stockholm and the fictional small town Engelsfors respectively.

The welfare state and the post-industrial ecaonomy

scryingforetelling the future using a reflective surface

pyrokinetics creating fire strictly by thought

telekinesismoving objects by mental power

bleshingthe psychic unity of minds

glamour the use of magic to make someone more attractive or the use of magic to attract someone

In The Circle, the paranormal is used to externalise and make tangible ‘invisible’ social and psychic pressures acting upon adolescent girls.

It was not a place that developed organically … Here everything was carefully planned from the outset … It is big. It is new. It is modern … They came on the subway. Or in cars, moving vans. One by one. Filtered into the finished apartments with their things. Sorted their possessions into measured cubbies and shelves, placed the furniture in formation on the cork floor. Bought new things to fill the gaps … A good place. That’s what people said to each other over the kitchen table a month or so after they had moved in. Only one thing was missing. A past … there wasn’t even a church. Nine thousand inhabitants and no church. That tells you something about the modernity of the place, its rationality. It tells you something of how free they were from the ghosts of history and of terror. It explains in part how unprepared they were. (Ajvide Lindqvist 2008: 1–2)

Still from Let the Right One In 2008

The socioeconomical environments in which the novels are set emerge as important beyond merely serving as a background; the paranormal discourse is used throughout to articulate ambivalence about existing social orders. Such novels demonstrate how paranormal discourse can enable the social realist genre to evolve. Yet, the genre’s core ethos of attending to the politics of the everyday, and the often poorly documented experiences of marginalised or precarious lives, is retained. Let the Right One In and The Circle illustrate distinct attempts to engage with social realism from within the realm of popular culture.