Markku Soikkeli: IN THE PLAYPENS OF PASSION
Dissertation on Finnish Literature, University of Turku
IN THE PLAYPENS OF PASSION
The adaptation of amorous discourse in the Finnish love novels of 1900's
What do we talk about when we talk about love? We probably present opinions on the passionate hetero romance that will interrupt the workdays. Romantic love is a `self-evident' series of events we talk about in phrases. For example Roland Barthes has examined these phrases as units of lover's discourse. Sometimes the phrases are connected to our possibility to understand a romance as if it were a show to some external audience. In this study I understand the phrases in question as figures that are characteristic to the discourse of romantic love.The purpose of the present study is to show that the structure of novel may be used to give new significations to the figures of discourse, such as the figure of 'love by first sight', or figures that justify the lover's actions by appealing to their 'naturalness'. Furthermore, one may perceive the amorous discourse in the novel in the narrator's comments. In order to define amorous discourse I describe how this certain discourse is used in presenting oneself as being in a state of mind ("in love") where one is not interested in social and economical advantages, although one has claims and hopes about another person.
When I examine the discourse together with a given story, I do not analyse a certain character's identity psychologically. What I do instead is that by the use of the term configuration I define how the mutual identification is performed in the situations between lovers. These situations are thematised by common figures. These figures affect the way the lovers' relation is narrated while the story itself gives new significations for the familiar figures.
My choice of the figures to be analysed is based on a study by Niklas Luhmann. In his study Liebe als Passion (1982; Love as Passion, 1986) Luhmann has examined the most common figures of amorous discourse from the beginning of the 1600's to the middle of the 1800's. I take forth the central figures (`codes' in Luhmann's theory) for my own study: 1) socializing on one's own conditions; 2) marriage, friendship and sex as the areas of intimacy which dependant on each other; 3) the control of romance; 4) the self-determinism of love; 5) the asymmetry of sexes; and 6) identification with a mediator- character.
In this study I centre the attention on the adaptation of these figures in the Finnish `love novels´ of 1900's. Although I try to reconstruct the history of modern literary romance, I do not search for any turning points of literary history. I aim my study to call attention to the social-historical context of the love novels.
For the analysis of each figure, I have chosen famous Finnish 'love novels' (modern love stories in the realistic mode) that are thematically suitable. My proposition to a new canonization of literary romance consists of fifteen love novels, none of them belonging to `popular romances'.
As the first category I analyse the figure of socializing on one's own conditions. The novels I use as examples are: Iris Uurto´s Rakkaus ja pelko (1936; 1966), Väinö Linna's Musta rakkaus (1948) and Eino Railo's Silkkihuivi ja virsikirja (1933). In these novels, on the one hand, the male upper class character does not find an identity attainable via romance and the female working class character is compelled to sacrifice herself to society. On the other hand, the woman may continue in a new role, whereas the man is not able to do so. The post-civil war society is too scattered for the virtue of the individual love to conciliate between the classes. In Railo's book romance is even an cause for the breaking out of civil war conflicts.
The second figure concerns different dimensions of intimacy: marriage, friendship and sex. An example of the family dimension is Eila Kostamo's novel Riisuttu talo (1994). It displays the tension between two types of families, the rational and the emotional ones. The expectations of sex intimacy as a mode of passionate love, then, can lead to self-observation and identification with a figure concerning the self (as a party of the relation). The example I use for the analysis of this dimension is Anna-Leena Härkönen's Akvaariorakkautta (1991). It is a story about a young woman's problems to feel satisfied with herself as a lover. In my analysis, Härkönen's novel displays the similitudes between family intimacy and sex intimacy.
The passionate falling in love is usually described in terms of wild ecstasy. However, the idea of romantic passion implies that the lovers do know what is happening to them. They can control their romance and they may have several consecutive affairs. Each of the relations tests the lover's ability to join in the society and to be morally responsible for her or his feelings. Each stage of the romance becomes an assessment of identity. The most famous Finnish novel about such a series of love affairs might well be Johannes Linnankoski's Laulu tulipunaisesta kukasta (1905; 1980; The Song of the Blood-Red Flower, 1920). In my analysis it emerges that Olavi, the Don Juan of this story, is compelled to a search for a biographical kind of narrative that would resemble his ideal of masculine life.
I also compare three novels that deal with a search for one's own reference group: Mika Waltari's Vieras mies tuli taloon (1937; 1985; A Stranger Came to the Farm, 1952), Matti Hälli's Suopursu kukkii (1943; 1965), and Jorma Korpela's Tunnustus (1960). In each of these novels, an urbanized man recognizes the rural roots of his identity by working in a farm. The pastoral place is in need for a real masculine man. After fulfilling the hopes of local women, however, the heroic tramp characters of the novels are relieved of every responsibility to home, while the women have to content themselves with mere housewives´ roles. As the fourth figure in my analysis there is the self-determinism of love. The way the meeting and conduct of lovers are explained in the novels depends on a `logic' that is typical only to romance. In closer analysis this logic is proved to be a consistency that follows the narrativity of the romance. The romances of this type deal with the lovers' 'elective affinities' illustrated for example in Goethe's novel with the same name, Elective Affinities (1872; orig. Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809). In them, the subject of the description can be a series of relations in which the recognition of the right partner depends on finding the right identity.
Marianne Alopaeus's novel Mörkrets kärna (1965) is a Finnish example of this aspect. The main character Miriam spends her childhood in Helsinki and her mature years in Paris. She feels that in Finland the social roles are closely related to family and nationality giving no room for solidarity for the reference group she regards as emotionally nearest to herself. For Miriam, Paris is the only place where both she and the Jews - to whom she feels `elective affinity' - bear same kind of identity as refugees.
Furthermore, and instead of fate, one may show the logic of romance as a biological necessity determining the lovers' behaviour. The lovers appear like animals that function on their instincts as for example in F.E. Sillanpää's novel Elämä ja aurinko (1916; 1994). The analysis of this particular novel also demonstrates that biological determinism is a part of the schematic structure of romance.
With the fifth category of romance the question is about the asymmetry of sexes. In romances, the lovers are usually described as representatives of different kinds of romantic desire. The figure of asymmetry becomes especially problematic if the lovers represent the same sex; on what is the difference in their desires then based? In the discussion here my examples are Pirkko Saisio's lesbian romance Kainin tytär (1984) and Christer Kihlman's gay romance Alla mina söner (1980; All My Sons, 1984). It is also noticeable that Kihlman's novel makes comment about the figure of psychologizing. By doing so it stresses the asexual and solidarital features of gay romance. The first-person narrator totalizes his past with the significations of a lost love to show how his identity has been formed through a literary relationship with a young "taxi-boy".
The sixth figure is concerned with romance as a disordering and reordering substance of society. The name I give to this category is identification with a mediator-character. In the stories of this type there is a mediator of desire - usually a rival - in which the lover has more interest than in his or her actual object of attention. For example in Toivo Pekkanen's novel Musta hurmio (1933; 1958. Black Ecstasy), the forbidden love causes a chain reaction in which each member of the community envies a social role from aother member.
One may connect this envy (or jealousy) with the Finnish mentality as a characterising feature. There are scant references to this in the novels examined here, but jealousy seems to be a central subject in novels where there is a lover stubbornly denying his reasons for a love affair. Jealousy as a figure is not among my hypotheses. It emerges, however, in the analysis of the novels of Linna and Pekkanen. Especially in Linna's Musta rakkaus, jealousy is the only way for the main character Pauli to react against his awareness of the social reasons of his relationship. The figure of jealousy is a measure of modernization and self-reflection. A jealous man reveals his awareness of those figures that determine how sexual or romantic the relationship he is attached to actually is. In his jealousy, he knows whether his relationship is more sexual or romantic than the one that the beloved woman might have with another man.
In Märta Tikkanen´s book Personliga angelägenheter (1996; 1997), there is a discursive `territory' of romance. Inside that territory, one is free to present his or her identity. In the framing structure of the novel, a woman is describing her life to her lover. The latter part of the novel consists of her father's love story, but the reader knows that it is told by the daughter. I interpret this internal story as a test of figures: do the thematic, intimate milieus like a hotel-room dictate our being, or is there any greater determinism on the schemes of romance? The adaptation of figures, the configuration, appears in situation motives where the new identities of the lovers are socially distinguished from their former definitions. The observations of narrator and character change according to these situation motives. In the analysis of the novels, the following situation motives can be found: the courtyard, the archipelago, the streets of town, the work of art, the performance of music, the speech situation, even the use of clothes. In the novels Akvaariorakkautta and Elämä ja aurinko, the former identities of the lovers were chaning in relation to the woman's body. The lovers' conduct and values are determined with respect to the state of femaleness of her body.
The difference between the social roles of the sexes is connected to locality. In a love story that emphasises self-control, for example in the tramp romance, a man's new identity is free of the family circle, free especially of paternal responsibilities. The woman, instead, is more tightly than before bound to the locality and to her maternal role.
In relation to the tramp romances, the three romances written by female authors I discuss - those by Härkönen and Saisio, and especially Märta Tikkanen - prove that `locality' is not just a spatial area, but also a discursive state of communication. The lovers can create their own situations by words and sentences, but only the women can act according to their situations. The only emancipative power left for the men is a kind of masochistic freedom to subordinate themselves to the will and words of a beloved person, and by doing so threaten the old definitions of gender identity.
Most of the novels I discuss show how people do not belong to each other in the ways the society requires. That way these `love novels´ can resist the exemplariness of the lovers and to justify how this type of romance differs from the tradition of love stories. But what kind of tradition there is left to write against when one deals with modern, individualistic romance? Love stories that aim at marriage have already lost their appeal, because the family no longer suffices as the foundation of intimacy and identity.
To conclude, we can argue that nowadays the tradition that is in opposition and with respect to which the love novel tries to be distinct, is the amorous discourse itself.
Translation corrected by Joel Kuortti.