What does the middle class have in common with cruel Sir Kato (from Astrid Lindgren’s Mio, My Son), apart from the task of embodying evil in the world? Self-loathing. No one despises the middle class as diligently as the middle class itself. Is there any contemporary novel where a reasonably typical middle-class existence is presented as harmonious and desirable?

The parking lot is abandoned.
Are there any novels, plays, films, TV series or newspaper articles where the values and customs of the middle class are highlighted as an obstacle to a happy and authentic life? 

Now we’re on one of the main arteries of modern culture, and it’s as crowded here as the expressway into Stockholm on a Monday morning. Dramatists Lars Norén and Henrik Ibsen jostle here with feminist writers Maria Sveland and Victoria Benedictsson; soap opera writers car-pool with cultural journalists, political activists with tabloid columnists. The middle class carries many sins, indeed all of them, on its conscience; it’s both lethal and ridiculous. But the original sin itself is dishonesty. Middle-class man always has something to hide. There’s always at least one skeleton in the closet of the middle-class family. Their home is always a snake’s nest of lies and repressed passions. Just look at Svensson, Svensson, a sitcom about an “average” Swedish family.

The arrogance of the aristocracy has been handed down from generation to generation and is thus natural, genuine. The quaint colloquialisms and straight-shooting ways of the working class are encoded in people’s genes. So these social classes can be both idealised and romanticised. However, the middle class is putting on an act so it has to be exposed by the penetrating playwright, critic or columnist (who is, of course, almost without exception middle class and thus knows what he or she is talking about).
Anxiety is often considered the fundamental problem of middle-class people. Balancing half-way up the social ladder, they refuse to let go and give into pleasure and nature. While the upper class is dancing away on tables in fancy bars and the lower class is partying and vomiting on tax-free ferries to Finland, the boring middle class is attending parent-teacher conferences and then going home to fantasise about new floors (her) or the next work-out (him).

When I do a random search for the expression “middle class” on-line, I wind up at the blog “Röd libertarian” [‘Red Libertarian’], which, following up on a survey referred to in the Stockholm tabloid Aftonbladet, gloats in confirming that the middle class has a worse sex life than others: “When the middle class wants sex, especially women, they’re scared stiff. They don’t want to be too prudish, they don’t want to be whores. They lie there the whole time thinking, with a tinge of panic, about what’s the right thing to do and what’s not. You’re bloody right they have bad sex!”
And they deserve it, the red libertarian thinks; the middle class deserves its punishment. That’s a fairly common point of view.

 

A few years ago, the English writer Ian McEwan published Saturday, a novel depicting a happy middle-aged middle-class man on a single Saturday filled with happy events and activities which separately and together show how rich and fantastic and, indeed, happy life can be, in fact very often is, for anyone who has the luck of being born in the right place at the right time. Surgeon Henry Perowne wakes up at the crack of dawn at his home in London and in the kitchen encounters his son, who is a musician who’s come home late after a gig. In the coming hours, Henry then has sex with a wife he loves, plays squash, visits his mother, and buys fish for a family dinner that evening, when his daughter, a promising poet, will return from a trip to France. It’s an idyll. But the doors to the outside world are not closed. The novel takes place on 15 February, 2003. That day’s massive demonstration against the war in Iraq suffuses the city and the novel and Henry Perowne’s reflections on ethics and politics.  

McEwan’s book is a literary masterpiece which also received consistently excellent reviews. But a reviewer here and there couldn’t help but feel a bit disorientated by all this middle-class happiness: “Saturday is a book that makes me happy, although it verges on self-righteous middle-class romanticism. Perowne is so decent, his wife is wonderful, the children independent and lovely, it should be off-putting but it doesn’t feel that way,” noted Ingrid Elam, frankly surprised, in Sydsvenskan. And Ulrika Kärnborg, in a highly favourable review in Dagens Nyheter, could still assure herself and her readers that the description of Henry Perowne’s Saturday was of course really supposed to be understood as “a eulogy to Western civilisation.” Phew! What a relief! This middle-aged middle-class man’s intense viewing of news programs could be interpreted in positive terms. “So paranoia creeps into this self-righteous atmosphere that the Perowne family wraps itself in like a security blanket.”

Like I said: the middle class always has something to hide – if not in the closet, then under the blanket.
Why, it could be asked, this recurring disdain for a broad and relatively peaceful part of the population whose way of living, values and dreams despite everything could hardly be described as odd? A happy family life, a beautiful, comfortable home, a good job with career opportunities, socialising with friends, varied leisure activities, solid finances, holiday travel, peace on Earth and a bottle of wine on a Friday night. The kind of things the middle class usually puts a high value on. One is almost tempted to describe these ambitions and ideals as realistic and normal in the cultural context represented by a Western welfare society.

Yet still this scorn, this constant worrying about one thing or another being dominated by or adapted to or attracting this very “middle class.” Sorry, one is tempted to snap back, the Hobbits had something better to do today and the Ents are happiest in the forest. But one doesn’t. After all, one is a middle class wimp and afraid of conflict. 

 

”Middle class” has replaced “middle-aged white man” as  a term of abuse in the cultural debate, Malin Ullgren and Gabriella Håkansson argued in an article in DN’s cultural section about two years ago (26 May, 2007). They saw this state of affairs as a consequence of stiffening competition in the opinion market. The classic cultural journalist is being challenged by bloggers, columnists and other newcomers who are demanding a place in the market and then use the old ruse of painting themselves as maverick underdogs in a struggle against a rigid establishment. “They assume the role of the intellectual as radical, oppositional and uncorrupted,” Ullgren/Håkansson explained, continuing, “The middle class then becomes the opposite: it’s a writer who’s conformed to the norm. An establishment lackey who nervously wets his finger to see which way the wind’s blowing. A bourgeois bohemian who’s neither radical nor liberal, just a meaningless in-between.”

There’s a lot of truth in that analysis. But it’s somewhat myopic and narrow-minded. The “middle class” is shrinking drastically and becoming basically interchangeable with Dagens Nyheter’s cultural section editors.
One could say that Malin Ullgren and Gabriella Håkansson substantiate their thesis offhandedly: that the middle class is a concept that allows itself to be used for just about anything. It always lets itself be defined in such a way that what a person doesn’t like falls on one side of the demarcation line while that person falls on the other side. This means that “the middle class” is often simply a product of the imagination, a Frankenstein’s monster made up of the characteristics and attitudes the constructor likes least.

That means, on the other hand, that there is no middle class. There are indeed a number of different kinds of middle class. The main varieties date back to the early modern period when two paths emerged from the ranks of the people: one led to the church, the other to the merchant’s house. One could serve either theology or money, be a cleric or a shopkeeper. Clergymen were gradually secularised and became teachers, journalists, cultural practitioners. Craftsmen and shopkeepers today can just as readily own their own business or be employees in service or industrial companies. This is obviously a rough outline that is in many ways misleading.

 

The differences on the vertical plane (between an affluent upper-middle class and a broad layer of overworked, impoverished small-timers) can be very large and more critical than the differences on the horizontal plane (for instance, between various representatives of this upper-middle class, like an editor-in-chief on the one hand and a managing director, on the other). But for clarity’s sake, one should nonetheless imagine the teeming middle class – all those lawyers, shop owners, accountants, local government bureaucrats, doctors, sales reps etc. etc. – allowing itself to be split between two poles: at one end is gathered the middle class that sees its task as creating or conveying non-material wealth At the other, those groups that instead see their calling as creating and conveying material wealth. Clerics and shopkeepers.

The two main factions in the middle class have a tendency to disparage the other. The intellectuals despise boors and philistines for their lack of culture and commitment. The factory owners and engineers think that eggheads and culture vultures are snobs that spew words non-stop and imbibe red wine at the cost of others.  

For the first time, Sweden now has a government that personifies the contemporary – mercantile – middle class. Previous post-war governments have all been led by people one could easily picture sitting in the old class-based Parliament of the Estates of the late 18th and early 19th century: the aristocrats Palme and Bildt, the frank or crafty peasant leaders Per-Albin, Fälldin and Persson in Vingåker; the conscientious pastors Erlander and Ingvar Carlsson (perhaps even Ullsten). But it’s impossible to imagine Fredrik Reinfeldt as prime minister in any other period than the present. He embodies the era of juggling a family, career and leisure with the same ruthless irrefutability that Karl XII personified the martial culture. Reinfeldt, our home-owning hero, is fighting against dust bunnies and loads of laundry.

 

In a leader from early 2009, Dagens Nyheter noted that moderate pragmatism currently seems to be a winning formula in European politics. No big dreams. No bold ideological digressions. Instead, quiet centre-right politics. Taxes that aren’t too high or too low and a state that provides enough care but not too much. Dagens Nyheter summed it up: “The centre of attention for the new right-wing parties is the educated, working middle class, ‘the ones that get up at 7 and go to work’. They want a salary for their labour and results for their tax payments. It’s a matter of a petty bourgeois work ethic, of protection against both big business and big organisations. But the new right, which embraces social welfare, also wants to provide protection against the vicissitudes of life, health care and pensions for everyone following the European, not the American model”    (DN 5 January).

Intellectuals, even those with rightist sympathies (I’m one of them), scoff and sneer at a prime minister who loves the middle-of-the-road musician Magnus Uggla and dances with his Hoover. But among broad groups, he gets high numbers for voter confidence, which in turn confirms to intellectuals that they have reasonable grounds for their abuse. He knows what people want? So did Stikkan Anderson (ABBA’s manager) and Bert Karlsson (a pop music impresario).

“I’m walking side by side with the people, carrying their confidence,” Reinfeldt said in an interview in July 2007. How kitschy does that sound? As kitschy as when a department head describes the introduction of a new invoicing system as “an exciting journey.”

 

With Fredrik Reinfeldt, the Swedish middle class sees itself as if it were looking in a mirror. He would rather carry a bargain-price flat-screen TV from the local big box store than earth-shattering ideas and a weighty cultural heritage. That’s why he also carries the confidence of the middle class.
Yes, in some sense, the clerics, the arrogant and argumentative part of the middle class, also trust Reinfeldt. We know where we have him. He’s the philistine in new clothes. Like Arvid Falk in Strindberg’s The Red Room, we now have a buffoonish big brother to distance ourselves from. It feels rather nice.
The disdain for narrow-minded normality can really only be cultivated with truly wholehearted enthusiasm in societies ruled by normality. 

“It’s so funny to see little nine-to-fivers, little nine-to-fivers.” Kenta and Stoffe gulp milk straight from the carton down in Stockholm’s main tube station. “Svensson,” Mr. Average Swede, rushes by in a hat and overcoat with a briefcase in hand.

That’s a key scene in Stefan Jarl’s classic documentary Dom kallar oss mods [‘They Call Us Misfits’] from 1968. Something is happening, and you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Nine-to-fiver? Kenta and Stoffe personify a rebellion of young people with a hunger for life against a dutiful society that is conventional and joyless. Like rambunctious puppies, they romp through central Stockholm, the sitting room of Swedish high modernism, sticking out their tongues at old ladies and ennui. They represent part of a cultural revolution that has still not completely lost its power of attraction, even if nowadays it usually makes itself felt in the form of nostalgia attacks and parodies. Like when the Swedish pop artist Kleerup railed against police drug tests at the 2008 Swedish Grammy awards, arguing that Sgt. Pepper obviously wasn’t made on green tea and vegetable soup. His underlying message: real artistry always requires stronger catalysts than five fruit and veg a day.

Only afterwards does one realise that these misfits were rebels that were right in keeping with the times. In the years when Sweden led the world in security and welfare, politicians, schools, social welfare workers, writers, TV producers, poets, cultural debaters, the evening newspapers and entertainment artists were all united in their conviction that  “society” (as people said back then) was headed in the wrong direction and had become too cold, too soulless and too materialistic. Pop songs either yearned for a return to a more authentic past characterised by community and warmth, “Lyckliga gatan” [‘The Happy Street’], or challenged the inhibitions of people in that era to let loose and get a little wild and crazy, “Gå och göm dig, Åke Tråk” [‘Go and Hide, Boring Åke’].

“Svensson” was that era’s equivalent of “the middle class,” the code word used by people to express disdain for a life without broad perspectives. Because the modern history of Sweden was a success story – significant portions of the working class could acquire a comfortable, middle-class life with their own home, colour TV, car, perhaps even a summer cottage – there were many Svenssons to pity. Sweden was chock-full of people achieving their “crappy materialist dreams.” On the other hand, it was fairly easy to escape the hell of Hylands hörnan, a popular Saturday night variety show. People just had to blast Cream and the Beatles, borrow their sister’s necklace and mum’s sheepskin and read Kerouac, Jack Kerouac. (Have you ever read him? I didn’t think so.)

In these boom times, it wasn’t just that the Biedermeier life that was democratised, but also that other incarnation of middle class identity – bohemian life. If almost any Swede could now be a Svensson, then almost every Svensson in the younger generation could afford to turn their back on the life of Svensson.

 

The engine for the project known as the Swedish welfare state had been the alliance between the workers’ movement and modernist intellectuals (modern clerics). This project embraced both a homogenising, standardising ambition (sterilisations and laminated wood houses) and an idealisation of the autonomous, critical individual who, thanks to the welfare state and all its systems of social support, was liberated from a humiliating dependence on masters and patriarchs. The state (and student loans) will make you free!
Historians Lars Trägårdh and Henrik Berggren, in their book of essays Är svensken människa? [‘Are Swedes Human?’], underline this distinctive Swedish etatist individualism rooted in the 19th century cultural debate and the soil prepared by Geijer, Almqvist, Strindberg and Ellen Key: “The Swedish welfare state was shaped under the framework of Sweden’s mid-19th century self-image: a distinct national community of free, independent individuals. The players were well defined in Swedish political culture: a warm community of the people, a strong but cold state and autonomous, genderless, timeless and equal citizens.”

As economic standards rose, these free citizens became increasingly less disciplined and more and more hedonistic.  Their individuality was expressed with growing frequency in consumption. A bigger car than their neighbours’. The first trip to Majorca on the block. The only pair of real Gul & Blå jeans in their class. A non-conformism confirmed at the checkout counter and the mall.

Alongside this there flourished the mass movement that we can call – based on the bohemian, pleasure-loving Disney bear – balooism: Be yourself. Be natural! Live in the present. Jump off the status-seeking bandwagon. What the hell are all mod cons? Kick your shoes off! The bare necessities of life will come to you
They’ll come to you!

Two defectors from the parade of grey suits and briefcases personified the era: the consumption hysteric and the consumption hippie. On one level, this meant a formidable triumph for the intellectual middle class, who has nurtured the cult of exceptionalism ever since the Romantic era, who dares to turn its back on conventionalism in a search for truth that transcends categories. Stagnelius – Strindberg – Norén.
To yearn for a world far from a Svensson existence, or at least be a bit embarrassed that one hadn’t, had become completely normal. Exceptions were now the rule.

 But how authentic can non-conformism really be when it includes a preponderant majority of the population, and is on sale as nice little how-to tips and mass-medialised mythology in every newspaper stand? At the one extreme, Ulf Lundell’s Kerouac-esque figure Jack and his mates. At the other end, chirpy songster Östen Warnerbring and his jolly Tyrolean hat. In between are the magazine-reading middle-class women who don’t bother about Christmas traditions and buy gingerbread cookies instead of baking them. To borrow singer Wille Crafoord’s fine formulation, Swedes had learnt to do the same different things.

Somewhere in the shift between the sixties and the seventies, the clerics won the final battle for the soul of the Swedish people. Since then, everyone in the Swedish middle class knows that they shouldn’t do what Svenssons do but should instead try to distinguish themselves from the masses.

Yet at the same time, the clerics lost their ideological dominance for all time and were reduced to one subculture among many. If someone wants to do something different with their life, there are now more enjoyable alternatives than listening to sermons. Instead, one can, for instance, try out for a docusoap, start a fashion blog, travel to the Great Barrier Reef or paint the house shocking pink.

The fact that the clerics now lack real influence probably explains their conformism and opposition to ideological deviants who have long prevailed in the cultural debate in Sweden. Like a threatened tribe, they gang up on intruders, and defend the old rituals and customs. Good art here is boundary-crossing, surprising, unpredictable, norm-breaking, provocative, dangerous, subversive, queer, radical, unkempt, original, taboo-breaking etc. That is, good art is comfortingly the same. Writing or saying something o u t r a g e o u s is still assigned high intrinsic value in the world of cultural journalism. There is a great deal of truth in this valuation. The provocative gesture, the mere fact that someone says something shocking and forbidden, can in itself carry significant meaning. In repressive and dictatorial contexts. But hardly in a culture where the worst punishment that can be inflicted is to be told off by Björn Ranelid (an author popular with female readers).

Provocation, by all means, but in safe forms. That’s the Swedish model. Berggren and Trägårdh single out Pippi Longstocking as the symbol of an anarchically tinged, hyperindividualistic ideal of freedom in the Swedish welfare state. But, they note, “freedom is not unlimited. Even if you could do what you wanted to in the backyard, the surrounding society is characterised by order and security.” Tommy and Annika’s middle-class home is ever-present as a place of retreat for anyone who is tempted, and perhaps even a bit frightened, by Pippi’s pranks. (And anyway, she had a chest of gold coins if she ever got into a jam.)

 

The two historians rightly maintain that it’s the way it always is with Astrid Lindgren. Freedom and security live side by side, as do individualism and community: Paradise Oscar has his little house and wife to return to after his vagabonding. Madicken (known in English as Mischievous Meg) lives in a family that is both unconventional (social radicals) and solidly middle-class. In Karlsson-on-the-Roof, Lillbror, Little Brother, is friends with an odd little man with a propeller on his back, but at the same time a well-loved child in a completely typical middle-class family. Emil gets into mischief time and time again, but is already destined to be a capable local politician and so on…

 

For many rebels of the sixties and seventies, this typical Swedish utopia was realised as harmonious co-existence. Some people managed to finance a life of exceptionalism based on exceptional talents. The singer/author Ulf Lundell, for instance. Others, perhaps many, have been able to continue to scorn “Svensson” from secure, established positions as clerics – at media companies, universities and cultural institutions. Still others, despite everything, have the requisite house in the ’burbs, but still keep the spirit of non-conformism alive with a cheeky tattoo, or maybe an earring and a ponytail. 

For others, things didn’t go as well. In Jarl’s films, the sky over Sergel Square in central Stockholm is heavy with fire and soot, a hellish furnace. Ulf Dageby’s haunting music is a torture chamber of beauty. Needles are plunged into a toilet flecked with shit. The water sucked up is mixed with blood and pumped out over the white porcelain of the toilet like a big red flower.

Ett anständigt liv [‘A Decent Life’] from 1979, the sequel to Dom kallar oss mods, is still an almost unbearable testimony to how fragile and valuable a decent life is. How easy it is to lose it, drop it on the concrete floor, be taken for a ride by conmen, see it sucked into the mud.

They die. One rebellious misfit after another, those that don’t want to get caught up in the life of Svensson get caught up in heroin and die. Stoffe dies too. And those who don’t die only have about ten years before they’re transformed into worn-out old people. The social safety net that was always present in the first misfit film, but more so as a catcher’s net (the child custody board, the police squad that picks up Stoffe in the final scene), turned out to be a chimera. And the junkies at T-Centralen never had any other safety net. In fact, they never came from Svensson families. They weren’t middle class. They couldn’t choose to develop their repudiation of the conventional into a middle-class identity and meal ticket. They were children of the alcoholic lumpen proletariat in the newly-built concrete suburbs. Today’s counterparts, as Stefan Jarl himself has noted, are no doubt the teenage boys from immigrant suburbs who, just like the misfits, build their identity based on a rebellious sense of being an outsider. Yesterday the beatnik cult. Today gangster romanticism.

 

Stefan Jarl has made two other films about misfits and their children. Det sociala arvet [‘From Misfits to Yuppies’] (1993) and the short Epilog [‘Epilogue’] (2006). They depict the way, not back to, but rather into the respectable, secure everyday life. In the last film, Kenta has also died. Stefan Jarl has inherited a Viking helmet and a large beer can. Kenta’s son Patrik – who in Det sociala arvet distanced himself from the outsider ideal by first enlisting as a soldier and then becoming a well-kempt yuppie-tinged sales rep – now invites Jarl to his son’s christening. The scenes from the church are gripping and powerful precisely because they are so completely “normal,” almost trivial. A family celebration. Happy relatives and friends. Maybe it’s funny to see these little nine-to-fivers, little nine-to-fivers, but life should be lived with joy.

Yet the clerics are still sulking. The same-old nine-to-five Svensson routine no longer applies to work (punk was the last outburst of hatred against the time clock). Nowadays, instead, it’s work that offers the dream of freedom and self-actualisation.

Instead, prison is the family. It’s here that the evil Norm rules over brainwashed prisoners in freshly-tiled cells. One can read about it not just in magazines and cultural sections in newspapers but also in one literary depiction of contemporary life after another. 

Of course, it’s possible to pick out historical or quasi-sociological explanations. But that really doesn’t make it easier to understand why, in a culture where the really strict norm says that one should accept everyone’s right to choose their lifestyle, one has a hard time accepting that there may be a few people who willingly and gladly choose to live as “middle class,” who perhaps truly like to do their job, fix the house, take the kids to their activities, invite the neighbours to dinner, watch Idol, listen to singer/songwriter Lars Winnerbäck and take a holiday to the sun in Thailand.

It’s even harder to understand how the despised middle class continues to encourage its own self-contempt (after all, it’s the middle class that forms the economic base for the cultural and pop-culture bashing of the middle class, that buys the novels and watches the TV series).

Time to finally raise the standard of revolt? Time to stop hanging one’s head in shame? There are pioneers and role models. Tage Danielsson, for example. In his first book, which was christened with pitch-perfect bureaucratic realism Book, he wrote himself into literary history in a biographical note in a way that is still bold today: “What he cherished most in life was his home, his family, TV, Ella Fitzgerald and a little schnapps on Saturdays and Sundays.”

Danielsson maintained that throughout his everyman existence, he stood out as an “uninterestingly unique specimen in the history of world literature.”

Perhaps this is exactly what one should bear in mind. What is unique in the everyday. The conformist as deviant. The right, in one’s capacity of being stinknormal (as the Germans say), bog-standard normal, to be respected as a representative of a minority group. Why should someone put up with being insulted simply because they’re a boring, grey sort of Svensson?
Say it out loud (not too loud), I’m grey and I’m proud.