Lapland is a cold song

By Tapani Ritamäki

Was it after all Timo K. Mukka, with his great novel (which became a great film) Maa on syntinen laulu (The Earth is a Sinful Song), who set the tone for how one writes about Lapland/northern Finland?

Mukka's novel, which came out in 1964 (the film by Rauni Mollberg came the same year as Mukka died, 1973), was written according to the realism of the time, which should really be called romanticism because of its backward-looking - in fact, nostalgic - character.

He lives on - I would maintain that current authors such as Rosa Liksom, Maria Peura and even Jari Tervo know their Mukka, if not from reading him then as a simple reflex - and that of course is much deeper-seated.

Now Liksom, Peura and Tervo are independent authors and differ from the basic article not least because of their sense of humour. Mukka, like most pioneers, couldn't afford to joke: people who go first must above all be careful to be taken seriously.

First at what? Well, I would maintain that the idea of describing Lapland as a grim place where life treats people harshly (violence, knives, raw sexuality) is more of a literary convention than a description of reality (using the word "reality" with all the reservations that one must observe nowadays, post structuralism). Northern Finland is not at the top of the statistics for violence, murders or divorce, and never has been - the only symptom of misery one comes across is the unemployment figures (currently around 20%, compared with an average of just over 8% for Finland).

Mukka's The Earth is a Sinful Song is put in the genre of ballad, a slightly ironic designation that is underlined by the song lyrics that introduce each chapter. The novel begins with a fatal stabbing, which shocks at first but which one soon realises will be forgotten because these kind of things happen - it's a natural law of that environment.

And what follows is worse. As a portrayer of sexual liberation, Mukka is much more modern than his narrative technique. What was shocking (and it's still taboo) for the public at large was his depiction of a woman (Martta) who relishes, and is almost easy-going in, her sexuality - generous both within her own family and to the men that gravitate around her. Violence is a consequence of sexuality: take for example the scene in which one of the suitors, after having slept with Martta, is indirectly put to death by her father - again, a deed that quietly disappears out into the generous Lapland countryside, unpunished.

Maria Peura's debut book (On rakkautes ääretön - Endless is Your Love) also depicts sex within the family, but here as downright abuse (committed by an older male relative). In Peura's follow-up, Valon reunalla (At the Edge of Light), there is also ill-fated sexuality, but this time in the form of a daughter's unsuitable, from the point of view of her parents, choice of partner. Again, the dark thing here is not the sexuality itself (this girl also enjoys it) but the reaction of the outside world.

Rosa Liksom's short snapshots in Yhden yön pysäkki (1985, published in English as One Night Stands, 1993), Unohdettu vartti (1986, Frozen Moments), Tyhjän tien paratiisit (1989, Paradise From an Empty Road) and others contain the same dark northern Finnish landscape, but given a grotesque twist that introduces humour as a liberating and at the same time concealing filter. If one puts exaggeration as a literary method to one side for a moment, there are gruesome things underneath: domestic violence, poverty, loneliness - Mukka's Lapland/northern Finland in reprise.

In Liksom's version, it has been a successful concept internationally too. Her books have been translated into countless languages: apart from the neighbouring Nordic languages, German, English, French, Dutch and more.

It is perhaps Liksom that Jari Tervo comes closest to in his epic about northern Finnish petty criminals, rugged men who take to the bottle as quickly as they do to their fists, rugged men for whom laws exist to be broken. Like Liksom, Tervo uses humour as the primary means of driving the story forwards, but that life (in Rovaniemi and the surrounding area) is hard is never in doubt, even if the consequences - as in Mukka's works - remain humanely gentle. (Perhaps like serial murders in a comic strip.)

Northern Finnish writers like to go beyond the standard language but, apart perhaps from Liksom, usually as indicators in the dialogues. A more noticeable common characteristic is the dark background of "reality", which more recent northern Finnish writers wrap up in comic exaggeration - something that in their mentor Mukka's writings perhaps has its equivalent in "the balladic". If one takes this absolutely seriously, one can see it as a literary method, the "grace" that reality needs in order to allow itself to be written about.

A scan (admittedly very incomplete) of northern storytellers in the neighbouring countries shows that Finland is alone in this - that is, in portraying the north as the origin of violence (in all its aspects and all its varieties: from domestic and sexual to that which is directed towards oneself).

Literature exists to describe what there is no room for on talk-shows, and more southerly Finnish storytellers (like the rest of the world) do the same, but the hypothesis here is that the scope for describing Lapland/northern Finland in any other way than the convention that has been established since the 1960s is smaller. Northern Finland has a more rugged outdoor climate than southern Finland, but interestingly enough the degrees of frost can be seen most clearly in literature.

P.S. Support for "artistically chilly northern Finland" can be found for example in painting: Kalervo Palsa (born in Kittilä in Lapland) with his paintings full of "ugly sexuality" and death, including penises in a state of erection that one can hang oneself from, bunches of flowers coming out of backsides, priests drinking with the devil... Only after the artist's death in 1987 has recognition come, with a large exhibition in the Kiasma modern art gallery in Helsinki a couple of years ago as the conclusive breakthrough. Rosa Liksom has incidentally referred to Palsa as her "spiritual brother".

Or take music: the fact that the Eurovision winners Lordi chose the monstrous as a means of expression is no coincidence: they are using the natural concepts of their home area, Lapland: the grotesque plus humour as a Verfremdungseffekt. With some success, it would seem.

Translated by Roy Hodson