Modernist Technique and Rural Life: Tage Aurell as a Prose Artist

Abstract

Tage Aurell’s breakthrough as an author came in the early 1940s, about a decade after his debut. His narrative technique is very distinctive, and some of his short stories are minor classics, but he is not among the best–known Swedish authors of the twentieth century. While Aurell travelled and studied in Europe in the 1920s, during the age of high modernism, he then settled in the village of Mangskog in Western Sweden. From this rural vantage point he wrote most of his laconic and profoundly local stories. My aim in this article is to show how the laconism and fragmentary style of Aurell’s texts entails the creation of new artistic forms. Examples of his narrative technique are gathered from ‘Pingstbrud’ (‘The Whitsun Bride’), ‘Grindstolpe’ (‘Gatepost’) and ‘Gamla landsvagen’ (‘The Old Highway’). In ‘Pingstbrud’, Aurell depicts in sparse scenes a rural community and how it reacts to the illness and death of a young woman. In ‘Grindstolpe’, two very different kinds of stories are intertwined in an unusual way. ‘Gamla landsvagen’ is Aurell’s most experimental text, a montage. I show the resemblance with Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem ‘Lundi Rue Christine’, and propose that Aurell looks at his rural village through the lens of modernism. Although the village people he describes seem hardly influenced by modernity, his textual composition is modernist. In these and other short stories Aurell renewed 1940s Swedish prose in a remarkable way.