Sara Danius sat on chair number seven. She often pointed out the beautiful symmetry that she, as the first woman to become permanent secretary, inherited the chair of Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to be elected to the Swedish Academy. Sara Danius understood symbolism.
In her winter talk from 2014, Sara Danius talks about the cancer. How provoked she became by the language about the disease, that one can overcome it. She refers to Susan Sontag, who has written both comforting and angry about the condition. But she also talks very jokingly about the wig she was forced to order when the radiation treatment caused her hair to fall off. She describes herself as a well-worn Angora cat. Sara Danius was, in addition to a sharp intellectual, funny. But often those things belong together.
Humor is also one of the reasons for her love of people. She has been described as one of the few Swedish intellectuals who appeals to most. In a classic text, she compares high fashionist Marcel Proust with mayonnaise: enjoyable, bold and with "the constant threat of formidable failure". There was something unholy about her attitude to finer literary. The appointment of Bob Dylan as a literary winner, she thought was a lot of fun. And the playfulness was sometimes perceived as inappropriate, as when her Scanian alter ego Gittan P Jönsson walked around with a broom to sweep out old shit from the meetings of the Swedish Academy. Or when she, polled by the same academy, showed up at the Nobel Party in an orange bark that took focus from everything else.
Danius began to use the characteristic blouse when teaching at Södertörn University. She has described it as an act of rebellion against the footy and beautiful. In the suites of the scandal in the Swedish Academy, the tie blouse came to be loaded with increasing importance. When she has passed away, the garment will be recharged, there is already talk of a knot blouse manifestation in her memory on Stortorget outside the Stockholm Stock Exchange.
In the essay collection Husmodern's death, Danius states that the disaster is capable of creating a whirl in the flow, and never as many swirls around the Academy have arisen as when it was on the brink of dissolution, following Dagens Nyheter's disclosure of the Culture Profile. In this media swirl, Danius acted swiftly and resolutely, to some in the academy's dismay. And in this medial whirl she shouldered the hero role, Horace Engdahl has described herself as "the prince of darkness". As a result, and that she did not succeed in one Academy, she was maneuvered out.
Sara Danius understood symbolism and our time needed something as unusual as a clenched heroine. It is incredibly sad that she has passed away and Sweden has lost a brave and funny academic who made the literature conversation more interesting.