In Antiquity, Hanna Johansson unleashes a rapturous, sinuous tale of desire and its reckless vehicle. After falling for an older artist, a misguided journalist follows her and her teenage daughter onto a trip to the Greek islands in an almost-instinctive sense of codependence, and soon the gorgeous shores are turned into a stage of ruins, in which a self-deluding passion lays bear the tensions between the wanting and the wanted. Shifting between the incantatory posturing of someone captivated by the forbidden and the anxious distortions of unreciprocated intimacy, Johansson deftly grows an explosive triangulation in which closeness begets isolation, and isolation begets tragedy. In the following interview, Sofija Popovska speaks to Johansson about Antiquity’s queerness, ancient Greece as a specter, and how the novel considers power.
Sofija Popovska (SP): Firstly, congratulations on your gorgeous debut novel! Before we dive into the text itself, could you tell me a little about how Antiquity came into existence?
Hanna Johansson (HJ): I started writing it seriously in 2018, and I had at that point been trying for a while to write a story about a trio of some sort. I find that kind of social structure to be very interesting and enticing—not the kind of love triangle where two people desire the same person, but a triangle where two people might belong to each other in this obvious, indisputable way, like a couple, or, as in Antiquity, a mother and her daughter, with a third person sort of looking in, desiring their bond more than anything else. I had also had a little bit of a personal crisis in 2016 and went to Ermoupoli for three months and realized pretty quickly that I would like to write something set in that city. It’s so beautiful and glamorous and strange at the same time. So, all of that had been brewing for a couple of years, and then, in the fall of 2018, I moved from Stockholm to a smaller city with my partner, who’s also a writer, while she was getting her MFA. I’m not sure I could have written it without those circumstances—the fact that she was incredibly supportive, and that we were living in a way that left me plenty of time to write.
SP: Described in its promotional materials as a “queer Lolita story” and as reminiscent of Death in Venice, Call Me by Your Name, and The Lover, Antiquity is, from the outset, embedded in a specific literary tradition. Was this cultural situatedness a planned feature? Were you ‘in conversation’ with any of these works—or other texts—during the writing process, and, if so, what effect did you hope to achieve by recasting (and subverting?) their themes and elements in Antiquity?
HJ: Yes, the cultural situatedness was a planned feature, I would say. I was very preoccupied, while I was writing Antiquity, with these sorts of queer or gay tropes—the age gap love story, for instance, which is one, although maybe not very nuanced, way of describing the novels mentioned—but probably even more the story of the guest who overstays their welcome, like Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. I read The Line of Beauty in my late teens and it made a huge impression on me. Saltburn is another example of that trope, to mention something even more current. These are all stories of people who are obsessed with beauty, and who have a desire for luxury, but they also have this seemingly unquenchable thirst for belonging—and an equally intense conviction that they can’t belong anywhere unless they are deceptive and not themselves—and this very much informs the narrator of Antiquity.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the word queer in the context of Antiquity since it came out—it was described as a queer Lolita story in Sweden too. The Lolita part of that description, I think, is supposed to tell the reader that this is a story of sexual abuse with an unreliable narrator, but the queer part is a little complicated for me. I think there’s a communicative aspect of putting that on the back of the book. Describing Antiquity as a queer story hopefully signals to queer people that this is something they might want to read. But at the same time, I think of it as a novel whose narrator is very deeply un-queer—she’s so convinced that her lesbianism rules out more or less any kind of community, be it in the shape of any kind of familial belonging, friendships, motherhood, love, or even kinship with strangers. And she has this sinister desire for a certain kind of lesbian tropes, like the tragic figure who is killed or driven to suicide, at one point lamenting that it’s not like that for her. One function of those referenced works in this novel, I think, is that I imagine the narrator of Antiquity to be very aware of them. She knows that she’s narrating.
SP: Greek mythology is an unmissable aspect of Antiquity, considering both its setting and the chapter titles referencing Greek myths. Is its presence in the text more of a nod to cyclical recurrence or a recasting of the original material?
HJ: Before Antiquity came out in Sweden I had a dream where I was presented with the cover and realized that everyone at the publishing house had thought it was an educational children’s book about Greek mythology, so they had renamed it Wow, Antiquity! and put on a little sticker that said it was recommended for kids ages six and up. When I woke up, I was so upset my partner thought I had a nightmare about being murdered. My interpretation of this dream is that it was an expression of my fear that anyone who reads Antiquity will assume that I actually know something about Greek mythology. I mean, I’ve read Anne Carson like all the other lesbians, and I know of the myths from reading children’s books, and from art and theatre, but I don’t have a particularly sophisticated knowledge of the subject.
But this is actually the reason why Antiquity has this framework, to some extent. I was interested in ancient Greece as an idea, almost as a specter, as a point of reference—in little signs of ancient Greece in everyday life, like classical features in architecture, or certain words. Those are rather trivial things, but there are other, more intriguing, or troubling aspects of this haunting too, like the ways in which the West has laid claim to the history of ancient Greece. I also think of the presence of Greek mythology in the novel almost as another example of a queer trope. I used to listen to this podcast, Like a Virgin, where in one episode one of the hosts, Fran Tirado, tells this story of reading Greek mythology as a child and being completely stunned by the casual mention of some god and his male lover, and I really related to that! This is of course a historical rather than a mythical figure, but the first time I can remember encountering the word “lesbian” was when I read a chapter about Sappho in this children’s book about famous women throughout history. It made lesbianism seem like something so desirable. I thought it was such a beautiful word. In hindsight I think it’s kind of amazing to be introduced to queerness in this way—just gods and soldiers and philosophers and poets fucking each other and, like, yearning. This joyful aspect of queerness in its relationship to Greek mythology is not very present in Antiquity, though—I think of the references to myths in the novel as references to fixed, canonized stories, which is something that I wanted to explore when I was writing it: the story of a family, the story of a place, the story of a love affair, or the story of an assault—I wanted to think of the way those kinds of stories also function as myths.
SP: One of the most captivating features of Antiquity is its unflinching examination of the morally gray aspects of authorship and artistry. The narrator turns to self-fictionalizing in order to escape her inner emptiness and inability to fully be in the moment—a behavior that is emphatically linked to authorship in the text. Later, this tendency to narrate shows its darker side when the narrator imposes a fictional interpretation onto the real situation of seducing a teenager. The dual affliction of the narrator is self-scrutiny and lack of empathy. Could you please talk more about how you see the entanglement of authorship or artistry, cruelty, and solipsism—and what its implications are for the relationship between artists and their subject matter (often other people)? What inspired you to probe these aspects of being an artist in Antiquity?
HJ: While I was writing I was considering power a lot, and the way people experience having or not having power. The main trio in Antiquity—the narrator, an artist named Helena, and Helena’s daughter Olga—are all very privileged people, who in various ways have power, but rarely imagine themselves as powerful people, and they are often unaware of situations where they’re yielding their power. I really, really loved this part of your review: “Had she been less dazed by her self-narration, the protagonist might have cared that Olga was an unloved child.” I think this inability of the narrator has something to do with the way she understands Olga. She doesn’t see her as a child at all, as someone who’s in fact quite powerless, who cannot come and go as she likes but is a victim of her mother’s whims. Instead, she sees her as someone who—by virtue of being a rich kid and having an artist for a mother and having an obvious bond to Helena, who the narrator is obsessed with—has more power than the narrator herself. I was also interested in the dual affliction you mention—self-scrutiny and lack of empathy—and also just scrutiny in general. One thing I find fascinating and troubling in some authors is a tendency to mistake their ability to scrutinize people for empathy, or for an ability to see things more clearly than others. I think a lot of times their scrutinizing is actually obscuring their vision of other people, leaving them with prejudiced and narcissistic impressions that they then rarely challenge. They think of themselves as perceptive but perceive nothing.
SP: Speaking of (self-)authorship, I was wondering how that aspect of writing interacts with the reality of seeing your novel in translated form. How did it feel to read your own text in another language? Did working with Kira Josefsson transform your perspective on Antiquity in any way?
HJ: I thought it was fabulous reading it in another language, and I’ve been completely enamored with Kira’s English since reading her first excerpts. Since I was so focused on language while I was writing it, I think working with Kira and reading it in English—where language was no longer a concern for me, as someone else was now doing all of that—made me see some things more clearly. Like the characteristics of the narrator, for instance—her simultaneous self-scrutiny and lack of empathy, as you so eloquently put it. I think reading your own work in translation would probably be a great way to edit, although probably not the most time efficient.
SP: Marginality is another striking element of Antiquity—in the opening scenes, the three main characters find themselves “on the periphery”, observing fathers and sons participating in events surrounding the world championships in harpoon fishing. The contrast between men and boys comfortably (and unwittingly) occupying the center stage while the three women (two of whom queer) watch from the sidelines commands the readers’ attention. Seeing as being on the periphery is crucial to both the narrator’s activity as (self-)narrator and her feelings of isolation, could you touch on the interplay between queer womanhood and authorship in the text?
HJ: One aspect of queer womanhood that has always interested me is the double-edged possibility of hiding in plain sight. I think most lesbian couples I know have had the experience of being mistaken for sisters, and there’s the whole roommate, gal pal joke: women who very clearly are lovers but are understood to be friends. This, of course, provides safety in a lot of circumstances, but it also creates a sense of isolation. I think this kind of isolation can be generative for an author—it provides you with this ability to see while not being seen. I think that’s also the position of the guest figure that I mentioned earlier, which is of course also a queer type. I do think a queer point of view, where you move through life and experience the theatre and the artifice of heteronormativity so clearly, is useful for an author, and I think the best heterosexual authors also have this point of view.
SP: What are you working on now?
HJ: I’m working on a novel set to be published in Sweden in 2025. It’s called Body Double, and it’s really two stories that are sort of braided together: one about two women who move in together and then start to resemble each other to the point of becoming each other’s doppelgängers, and one about a woman working for a ghost writer. I want it to read like a European co-production thriller from the turn of the millennium, like Haneke’s Cache. I still find it difficult to talk about my larger artistic project—I don’t think I’ve written enough to be able to see it clearly yet, and I might never feel like I have—but some themes are certainly lingering from Antiquity in my current writing: loneliness, self-reflection, what’s false and what’s real.
HANNA JOHANSSON is a Swedish author and art critic based in Stockholm. Antiquity, her debut novel, won the 2021 Katapultpris and was short-listed for the Borås Tidning Debutant Prize.
Sofija Popovska is a poet and translator currently based in Germany. Her other work can be found at Context: Review for Comparative Literature and Cultural Research, mercury firs, Tint Journal, GROTTO Journal, and Farewell Transmission, among others.