Finnish and Finland-Swedish Realism

By Pia Ingström

For decades, various kinds of realism have intertwined in Finnish literature – hysterical realism, social realism and pseudo-documentary intonations are mixed together in homage to the realism of social construction. In Finland-Swedish prose, the tradition of big realism is not as old, but it is awash with small realisms.

Hysterical Realism
In Jari Tervo’s latest novel, Myyrä (The Mole, 2004), Finland after the Second World War is compared with the baker in Treblinka. He bakes his bread and is pleased that business is going well thanks to the barracks community that has grown up outside the village. What is actually happening there, and why the smoke from the chimneys smells so strange, he doesn’t want to give a thought to. Tervo’s main character is Finland’s long-time president, Urho Kaleva Kekkonen, the man who for three decades was regarded as standing as personal guarantor for Finland’s good relations with its menacing neighbour to the East, the Soviet Union. Finland’s prosperity was built on „trade with the East“ and this presupposed that one didn’t think too closely about what one saw, heard and remembered about what went on in the neighbouring country.
Myyrä is a burlesque, cruel and comic novel, and if one is to describe it in terms of realism, then it is a fine Finish exponent of the new trend of „hysterical realism“. The phrase was coined by James Wood five years ago, to describe Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth (2001) and other „big, ambitious novels“ of the time that „strive for vitality whatever the price“, but lack the vein of fundamental humanity in their characterisation.
Tervo has been productively perfecting his style for decades with burlesque stories about petty thieves and eccentrics from the countryside of the wild North. Myyrä is his first attempt at what in Finland is respectfully called „a great national theme“.
Such themes, like traditional social realism, enjoy great respect in Finland. The novel was a clear ally in the Finnish national project, and when public discussion was radicalised, it was natural that the novel should take on the task of criticising society, along with those of mediation and healing. Themes that are representative of society – the war, changes in the national economic structure, depopulation of the countryside, the self-knowledge of the (male) educated classes – had high status.
But today it is of course no longer possible to encapsulate the representative, the general (historical, political) that is to be reflected pertinently in the specific (the individual as bearer of a class identity, etc.) according to the classical Lukacsian recipe for realism. The big stories have been split into countless small ones, and the essential is perhaps rather the exceptional, blown up – in both senses – into the grotesque, or detail distorted in satire’s or farce’s house of mirrors.

Historical persons
The British author and literary expert, David Lodge, observed at the Gothenburg Book Fair last year that he himself, in his novel about Henry James, Author, Author (2004) represents a strong trend in Western literature today – at the moment, many novels are being written about people who really existed or events that really happened. The great realists of the 19th century had, like the great modernists of the early 20th century, great faith in their ability to create their own fictional worlds, complex and densely populated. Today’s authors do not. Hence the interest in real people and historical material.
Historical events and real historical people who were regarded as men or women of distinction are in fact also well represented in books published in Finland in recent years. What is being written can only sometimes be described in terms of realism, but a striking feature is that so much of what is being written is built upon some kind of research using historical sources.
A sample of what is happening in Finnish literature is given by the jury that puts forward nominations at the end of the year for the Finlandia Prize, the country’s greatest literary distinction in the field of the novel. This showed a clear resonance with the trend described above. No less than four of the year’s six candidates were novels about real persons or real events. The texts glide between knowledge and free fantasies, between documentation, intuition and poetry.
A clear candidate for nomination was thus Jari Tervo’s Myyrä, described above, with Kekkonen as the main character, depicted in hysterical realistic style – and without doubt also dehumanised.
The Finland-Swedish nomination was Erik Wahlström’s The Dancing Priest, his debut novel. It is a humorous and thoroughly researched portrait of the founder of Finnish elementary schools, Uno Cygnaeus, rooted in a richly painted picture of the 19th century’s national awakening and world of ideas as much as in the main character’s erotic energy and its complications.
The third novel connected to history was Asko Sahlberg’s Tammilehto (The Oak Grove). Here, the main theme is the Finnish Civil War of 1918, a national trauma embodied by the fates of a number of fictitious people, with an almost primitivistically depicted sexuality as the „innermost truth“ about their identity and relationships. Tammilehto is both repellent and engaging, a novel that blends naturalistic belief in the purity of the blood and determinism with the divine spark of human free-will. This is a novel that one is never really finished with, and one reason is probably exactly this hybrid quality. Or its contradictory, chameleon nature – just when one thinks that the point is to write off determinism, the tale flips over again into elemental sex scenes dangerously charged with symbolic content. For anyone who refuses to believe that class oppression can fundamentally be understood through descriptions of sexual violation, this book is not easy to digest. But as a linguistic work of art and a world in text format, it is worthy of total respect. The prize was eventually won by Helena Sinervo, with a careful and thinly fictionalised novel about the modernist poet, Eeva-Liisa Manner.
Sinervo’s original intention was to write a straightforward biography, and the novel Runoilijan talossa (In the House of the Poet) never really takes off as fiction, but simply offers pickings from the archives, thinly disguised as pictures of the main character’s psychological sensibilities. But the subject was undeniably a „great national theme“ because Manner is a prominent name in poetry.
Another, and in my opinion much more successful, example of the fictional use of a historical figure, came out the previous year; Rakel Liehu’s impressive novel Helene (2003), about Finnish painting’s world celebrity, Helene Schjerfbeck. (Helene has recently come out in a Swedish translation and has been nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize.) Liehu is freer and more certain of her material, and dares to tackle interesting representations of the artist as a rigorously working intellectual, and not just as a lame, poor and lonely woman. When one has finished reading, one can feel that one has learnt something about painting, not just psychology.

Finland-Swedish linguistic roots
For literature that is written in Swedish in Finland, traditional realism’s demand for representativeness has always been a stumbling block. How does one write about Swedish-speaking individuals – people – so that they become representative of a country where the majority language is Finnish? At one stage (in the 1950’s and 60’s) it perhaps looked as if all borders were closed to Finland-Swedish prose, and that it had to make do with psychological realism and the narrow confines of chamber plays. However, the 80’s marked the beginning of a remarkable invigoration of Finland-Swedish prose. „The great Finnish novel“, an intimidating model for a minority literature like Finland-Swedish literature, had been dethroned by post-modernism, and the linguistic minority could relax and look at the matter more playfully. It also turned out that the bounds of the ego could be crossed in all manner of ways. In his Siklax trilogy (1991, 1997, 2003), Lars Sund reminded us that Finland-Swedes could dig for their linguistic roots both in the Finnish region of Österbotten and amongst the emigrants in America. The bilingual city as depicted setting entered literature with Kjell Westö’s novellas – which can be studied in Lugna favoriter (Mellow Favourites), published last year – and in Kim Weckström’s Sista sommaren (Last Summer, 1996), which is like a plant that has run wild and is sometimes wearyingly dishevelled.
Westö is perhaps the Finland-Swedish author who has latterly invested most in implementing the virtues of classical realism. In his second novel, Vådan av att vara Skrake (The Trouble With Being Skrake, 2000), it is already possible to see a striking interest in exactly those big historical subjects that genuine societal realism devoted itself to – war, class conflicts and cultural chasms reflected in the fate of the individual.
The same themes also interest Ulla-Lena Lundberg, who in her maritime trilogy – Leo (1989), Stora världen (The Big Wide World, 1991), Allt man kan önska sig (Everything One Could Wish For, 1995) – made Åland the laboratory where she investigates how navigation by farmers develops into the luxury ferry business, and small, self-sufficient local communities are transformed into small knots in a constantly growing global web of human and material transactions. But she is „less of a realist“ than Westö in the sense that she varies the format more radically. The maritime trilogy can in fact be used as a pedagogical illustration of how a realistic (Leo), a modernist (The Big Wide World) and a post-modern (Everything One Could Wish For) novel could look.
Monika Fagerholm for her part, with Underbara kvinnor vid vatten (Wonderful Women by the Water, 1994), created her own hybrid format that she stuck to in her later novels, Diva (1998) and Den amerikanska flickan (The American Girl, 2004). She really plays fast and loose with realism’s laws of representativeness, narrative methods and chronology, but at the same time creates absolutely realistic places for the reader to walk around in. In The American Girl, we wander around in the District, with fens and muddy parts and bizarre imported architecture, and countryfolk who say things like, „Fjöl Å“ and „E vi ta na hä“.
The dialect is invented (English equivalents might be something like „Jegger me“ and „Wi tak ain as haa“) and forms a humorous commentary on one of last year’s smallest but most amusing Finland-Swedish trends: that dialects and spoken language made their presence felt in several books. This too is a kind of realism – to let all registers of the spoken language be heard in literature. Vivi-Ann Sjögren, in her book of memoirs, Lasses kiosk (Lasse’s Kiosk, 2004, a follow-up to Kattens ansikte – The Cat’s Face, 2003 – childhood memories that equally tenderly promote the language), shows how Swedish was spoken in Espoo – which just a few decades ago was a primarily agricultural Swedish district, but is now nomore than a conglomeration of modern suburbs in Greater Helsinki.
Mikaela Sundström’s Till alla hästar och till vissa flickor (To All Horses and To Certain Girls, 2004) had elements of dialect from eastern Uusimaa – the area east of Helsinki – while Sabine Forsblom’s Maskrosguden (The Dandelion God, 2004) positively feasted on the Porvoo dialect’s turns of phrase, sayings and tall tales. Here too we encounter the paradox of the new realism. That which feels most authentic – truest and in the simple sense most realistic – is often the most individual. As when one of Forsblom’s Porvoo residents guarantees his daughter’s virginity with the phrase „Tär har int flugun krypi yvi heller!“ („Not even a fly’s been near her!“) and we happily feel that we are sharing in something absolutely universal and authentic.

Pia Ingström is a critic and a literary editor

Translated by Roy Hodson