Öppna meningar, Essäer

Mikael Enckell’s latest collection of essays has the fitting and, as it ought to be with him, paradoxical title Öppna meningar (Open meanings). As it is, he is once again concerned with the same meanings, something this reviewer is very happy about. There is a preoccupation today with a both tiresome and self-defeating search for news. Without acknowledging our history, our forerunners, such a search risks becoming pure repetition. Furthermore, the denial of history and of the conflicts associated with finding ones place in relation to those who came before becomes a draining limitation on possible openings for genuine encounters and creative thought. That is one way of describing the issues Enckell keeps returning to.

Apart from the monumental biography on his father, Enckell’s books are usually short, yet reviewers are faced with problems similar to those the author himself talks about in the latest collection’s opening essay Fried and Freud. He there discusses Risto Fried’s Freud on the Acropolis with the subtitle A detective story, a 650 pages and therefore ‘glaring’ review, both in scope and in incidence, of the comment literature on Freud’s but 6 pages long A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis .

It would be foolish to think that one could summarize the thought Enckell introduces us to on these pages. However, it would also, as he himself points out, be almost comically simple:

In his apologies for the mutually related, unbearable, enticing and inevitable, and invariably rediscovered traditions, the psychoanalytic and the Jewish, Enckell has, at least over the last quarter century, pointed to two elements central to both and which grant them a renewed existence, importance and meaning through the decades: extant ambiguity and maintained connections to our past. (s.36)

With that barely anything would have been said. Nothing about the richness of Enckell’s ability to capture essentials in Freud’s and now also in Fried’s ambitious works and simultaneously, almost