Revisiting the Millennium Trilogy

I have started the process of moving my newsletter, but it has proved complicated to set up. I hope to be in my new place next week. Previously, I mentioned that one of Substack’s biggest accounts, Platformer, was pressing the leadership for answers about its policies on outright Nazis and hate speech. The author, Casey Newton, got unsatisfactory replies, and decided to move to Ghost. Newton explains that one of the issues is that Substack aims to help newsletters be more social and grow, so it is not simply a neutral and basic framework that anyone can use, it actively promotes harmful content. The Substack leadership could have responded to Substackers Against Nazis in any number of ways. They chose to double down, and make the promotion of hate speech part of the brand.

Before I wind down this version of Colder Eye, I wanted to revisit The Millennium Trilogy, which sparked the idea for it when I was in Stockholm last year. I picked up the second volume of the trilogy, The Girl Who Played with Fire.

Right now I am only about two chapters in, and already I have been introduced to a man who beats his wife and gotten a second glimpse of Lisbeth Salander’s rapist of a guardian, who is searching for the man who first gave her a longing for vengeance, her father. There is something so stark about the different layers of patriarchy on display here that it struck me as elemental, as though this is the story not just of Salander, but of women everywhere. That appears to be Larsson’s intent. Wherever Salander goes, she runs into new variants of the same evil. And the truly abominable thing is, the different members of this dark fraternity work together. The guardian searches for the roots of Salander’s trauma in order to find allies in his quest to take her down.

Last week, I happened to mention the novelist Lawrence Durrell. The guardian’s interest in a traumatic incident from Salander’s past reminded me of the most vivid part of Durrell’s Justine, the first novel in The Alexandria Quartet. I read the books a very long time ago, and the only part that has really stayed with me is the way the narrator expressed fascination with Justine’s past, and what he called “The Check”—some kind of trauma, probably sexual, which prevented her from truly loving another person. Even as a teenager, the treatment of this block of Justine’s struck me as creepy rather than empathetic, as if the narrator had made it wholly about himself and his attraction to Justine—and how this trauma added to her luster—instead of considering this event from her point of view. At some later point, I discovered that the character of Justine had been based on Durrell’s wife, Eve Cohen, and shuddered.

Larsson presents the guardian’s point of view as a detestable one, and he obviously intends a stinging critique of patriarchy, but as I pointed out in an earlier essay about the sexual violence in the first book of the trilogy, the feminism of Salander and her creator seem a bit off-base to me. If Durrell or his narrator is too self-centered to examine a woman’s trauma in any useful way, Larsson is too focused on revenge scenarios. I take his point that many women have to contend with extreme levels of violence, and that such violence is much more prevalent than is commonly acknowledged, but I’m not convinced that wild revenge fantasy is the most helpful or cathartic response. I assume the books are Larsson’s way of dealing with having been a bystander to a traumatic event in his youth.

I am reading too many books at the moment. I am also in the middle of Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger, about how she gets confused with another, much worse writer with the same first name. The other Naomi—the crazy conspiracist Naomi Wolf, who used to write somewhat thoughtful feminist treatises—has a book called Promiscuities that I often think of in this context. Wolf suggested that most girls have a traumatic introduction to the world of sexuality, and carry around a kind of core wound from these early episodes. Wolf grew up in San Francisco, where a lot of the adult talk about sexuality around her centered on liberation. But one of her own first brushes with it was a thirty- or forty-year-old possibly homeless man calling out frightening sexual remarks to her as a child of eleven, on her way to school. As I recall, this man was sitting in or near a bush, and at first she though the bush was talking to her, adding a biblical cast to the incident.

Wolf’s description made me think of this type of incident as a common first layer—an early sprinkle of trauma in which you first get the sense of yourself as an object, or as prey. Obviously, this is not every girl’s first experience of the male gaze, or of male sexuality generally—the underlying violence may be more explicit, or indeed the main component—but that was an example that felt true to life, isolating and identifying the core strangeness of those early experiences. It’s hard to achieve that stand-alone sense of “oh, I’m an object” in a passage written by a man, in which the woman is in the process of being treated as an object. This second book of Larsson’s trilogy opens with a scene of a girl or woman tied to a bed, and although it is presented from her point of view, there is also a lot of disconcerting detail about the leather straps holding her down, and what position she is in, and what she is wearing. It feels out of place, if it’s supposed to represent how she sees things.

I may have more to say about the trilogy as I revisit it further, but I hope to be writing from another site next week. Thanks for reading!