Valtiomuutos ja satiirin pohjoinen ulottuvuus: Alueellinen ero ja kirjallisuuden politiikka Haanpään, Huovisen ja Heikkisen tuotannossa
Abstract
Since the 1980s, the Finnish state has been reshaped in significant ways, much like the transformation of statehood and state territoriality which has taken place all over the world. The economic, social, political and cultural forces working to reshape the state have undermined the legacy of the welfare state era and its “one nation” politics within Finland.
To gain a better understanding of these transformative processes, my thesis focuses on the continuities and discontinuities in the dynamics of territorial and social integration/ disintegration of the Finnish state. My approach is through readings of satirical literature from the 1920s to the 2010s, where I focus on selected novels and short stories by three writers whom I believe are the best representatives of the northern dimension of satire in Finnish literature: Pentti Haanpää (1905–1955), Veikko Huovinen (1927–2009) and Mikko-Pekka Heikkinen (1974–).
I use “the northern dimension of satire” as a heuristic device, which refers to the relative marginality of satire in Finnish literature, and to the shared cultural background of these prominent satirists, who all hailed from northern Finland. It can be understood as a centrifugal tradition rejecting the longstanding line of Finnish cultural policy and discourse on literature, which typically treats indigenousness as a problem while promoting a Finnish version of “genuine” European high culture. This satirical literature has often questioned these activities, as well as the politics of asserting cultural superiority from the core, the capital city of Helsinki in particular. It problematized the spatial and political structure of the state and the way in which its discursive practices define some places and scales as culturally valuable and reduce others to insignificance.
My research design brings together materialistic and discursive perspectives on the political geography of state transformation. My analysis of state transformation is based on a materialist philosophy of history in which the spatial transformation of the state, as well as cultural production, are understood to be intimately connected to the development of the capitalist economy and its contradictions. These contradictions in turn necessitate different kinds of state interventions and strategies that seek to establish spatio-temporal fixes in order to balance accumulation strategies with the need for social cohesion and territorial integrity of the state. I approach the political processes of Finnish state transformation through a periodization of state territoriality (an areal state from 1917 to the 1950s, a welfare state from the 1950s to ca. 1990, and a competition state from the 1990s onwards). With the help of this periodization I interpret the historical context of the satires of Haanpää, Huovinen and Heikkinen as well as the social and political contradictions articulated in their works. I conceptualize the discursive perspective as the “politics of literature”. This implies focusing on the ways how the disagreement constitutive of politics is articulated in symbolic acts of literature. Moreover, I argue that satirical literature delegitimizes and challenges hegemonic discourses and virtuous subjectivities used to stabilize certain configurations of power.
In order to historicize the political reading of literature and bring together the materialist and discursive perspectives on state transformation, I build on the theoretical synthesis of literature as a socially symbolic act proposed by Fredric Jameson. Thus, my narrative analysis operates on three levels: the political, the social, and the historical. I reconstruct the text as a symbolic act, as an ideologeme, and as an ideology of form, respectively. The levels are applied to examine the analyzed literary texts as regards their relation to political contexts, class discourses, and historical change. The relationship between the literature and the materiality of state transformation is thus considered as dialogical, or narrative, not mechanically or expressively causal. Nonetheless, Jameson’s rather sweeping conceptualization of “the political” is modified through a critical examination of the concept of politics. My approach to literature interpretation builds on Jacques Rancière’s notion of “the politics of literature”, which I seek to spatialize and historicize by drawing on the theories of postmodern by Jameson and David Harvey.
The analytical part of the thesis consists of five articles which analyze different phases and aspects of the Finnish state transformation through satirical texts.
- The Satirical Politicization of State Transformation in the Novel Terveiset Kutturasta (Greetings from Kuttura) by M-P. Heikkinen (2012), Politiikka 2/2013, 73–90.
- Politics of Border Crossing in the Novel Noitaympyrä (The Witch Circle = vicious circle). Tiede & edistys 39:4, 321–346.
- Easy Living in the Hinterland? The Welfare State in the Satire of V. Huovinen (Short stories and short prose published between 1963–1986). forthcoming Alue & ympäristö 1/2015.
- World Politics Behind the Bush: Satire on Mustached Sovereignty (Historical Novels on Hitler (1971), Stalin (1988) and Peter the Great (1995) by V. Huovinen). Kosmopolis 44:3–4, 96–111.
- Accumulation and Destruction in Three Generations. Kolmen Töräpään tarina (The Tale of the Three Töräpää’s) by P. Haanpää (1927) and “The Notion of Expenditure” (1933) by G. Bataille, Niin & näin 4/2013, 45–53.
The historical logic of the articles is genealogical rather than chronological. The first article analyzes the contemporary circumstances through the dystopian satire of Heikkinen. In it the disintegrating processes of the competition state have devolved into territorial separatism and civil war. The second article focuses on the problems associated with the Great Depression of the 1930s, which Haanpää’s novel Noitaympyrä approaches through the proletarianization of the state citizen and through the symbolically charged and transgressively political act of quitting the capitalist world-order represented in the novel by an act of crossing the border to the Soviet Union. In the third article the focus is on the welfare state era. In Huovinen’s satirical short prose the welfare state, in my reading, is seen as a radical modernization project which cured the social sickness of unemployment and poverty but at the same time introduced new “diseases of affluence”. The fourth article scrutinizes the nature and scales of state transformation through the problems of political leadership and world politics thematized in Huovinen’s historical novels on Hitler, Stalin and Peter the Great. In the concluding article the rationality of the economic logic of accumulation is challenged through the notion of expenditure or dissipation. The theoretical concept of dissipation, formulated by Georges Bataille in 1933, is used as an interpretive code to a satirical novel by Haanpää (1927), which evinces a strikingly similar logic of questioning.
The central aspects of the spatiality of state transformation in the thesis are the processes of territorial integration and disintegration as well as the political subjectification of the state citizen. My interpretation of the satirical texts discloses the discursive logics of these processes and challenges the economistic and ahistorical ways of treating the territorial and social integrity of the state as a given. Analyzing the politics of literature allows distinguishing the historical phases and distinct ways of politicizing state space.
