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“The Half Blood”
Fritz Lang, prophetic master director of the 1920s and 1930s (with the visionary “M” and “Mabuse”- lms), called one of his first films “The Half Blood”. Besides the fact that this personally marked a sounding board for Lang, himself half-jew in a cultural sphere increasingly marked by anti-semitism, the film is connected with a view, cherished by, e.g., Red-Indian book mythology, of the “half bloods” as a special kind of evil, depraved, and unreliable individuals. The central character in the latest book by Tor-Björn Hägglund, Sutto the half-wolf, offers the reader a way of approaching a field of phenomena often fearfully warded off. Because Hägglund's life work-irrespective of whether we look at it from a psychoanalytical-clinical, an autobiographical, or a purely literary angle-strikingly clearly shapes a psychoanalytical ideal: to retrieve, as far as it is possible, those experiences, impulses, and parts of ourselves, that we have pushed out into the world around us and tried to keep there only; the book can be seen as a consistent completion of a life-long endeavour of integration.
Wittgenstein's “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” is often referred to. Like all half-stale intellectual catch-phrases, this one is also, the way it is practised, a highly problematical recommendation. To me, Hägglund's whole authorship, the psychoanalytical as well as the literary, has seemed to be near the opposite: to approach that which is outside man's immediate cognizance, that which is near the border, or even beyond the border, of that which we can clearly grasp and understand: death, nature, and the psychically unconscious. Nothing unites us as the riddles we all are unable to solve. No questions are more worthy of asking than those to which we cannot have answers.
“Koirasusi Suton elama” (The life of the dog-wolf Sutto), the literary portrait of the half-wolf Sutto, the way this comrade and companion was seen by the author, starts, consisten