Asko Sahlberg's Herodes

Mika Hallila Uniwersytet Warszawski Retelling Salome: Asko Sahlberg’s Herodes Abstract: The article presents an analysis on the retelling of the story of the Princess Salome in a contemporary Finnish novel, Herodes (2013) by Asko Sahlberg. In the analysis, Salome’s story is considered as an outlandish narrative of an outlandish character that has interested people through history, and especially in the modern era. Sahlberg’s narrative of Salome is contextualized within some of the most known versions of Salome’s story such as the Gospels, and the play of Oscar Wilde. Eventually, the aim is to point out how and to what ends the rewriting of the story of Salome is done in this novel. Keywords: Salome, retelling, rewriting, outlandish, Finnish literature, contemporary novel The topic of this article is one of the most famous female characters of the biblical stories: I will analyze the story of the Princess Salome. The main focus of the analysis is on the retelling of the story of Salome in one contemporary Finnish novel, Herodes (2013) by Asko Sahlberg. I am asking how and to what ends the story is retold in this novel. When analyzing Sahlberg’s novel, I will especially focus on the narrator–protagonist Herod Antipas as his voice and his point of view make a particular change in the story of the Princess Salome. The key concepts formulated in the analysis are the ideas of retelling and rewriting, and outlandishness; as shown here, the Princess Salome is an outlandish character whose mystery has remained unsolved through history. The representation of the Princess in Sahlberg’s novel is, hence, part of a long tradition of the interpretations and reinterpretations of the well-known historical narrative which took place at the beginning of Christianity. More than anything else, Salome is a biblical character, and when thinking about the outlandish stories that are widely known in the Western culture, the Bible certainly is a real source of abundance. The Book of Christianity involves such an amount of oddities that it would be hard to imagine them without the knowledge about the fact that they already exist in the Bible. Most of these strange stories and characters have fascinated literary imagination through centuries. As Northrop Frye in his seminal work The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981) has taught us, the Bible is both an extraordinary literary masterpiece with a complete structure and the great source of the stories in the history of Western literature. The narratives of the Bible continue their living and transforming in contemporary literature as well, regardless of that whether the question is about the plots, the motifs, the themes, or the characters of these narratives. In the following analysis, the Bible is one important subtext amongst other known narratives of the Princess Salome. By contextualizing Sahlberg’s narrative within the intertextual connections between the other narratives and interpretations of Salome, I will point out how and why Herodes changes the idea of this character. Furthermore, 164 Mika Hallila especially in the context of Sahlberg’s other prose fiction, Herodes raises some further questions such as: Why to rewrite and retell this very story from the beginning of Christianity? How and why this particular story from history changes when it is retold in the Sahlbergian manner? Why retelling Salome is relevant in our time? Herodes in Sahlberg’s œuvre Herodes is the twelfth novel of Asko Sahlberg, the Finnish author who lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden. Sahlberg debuted in the beginning of the Millennium with the novel Pimeän ääni (2000; “The Sound of Darkness”) and has so far published fourteen novels. Even though he emigrated from Finland to Sweden in 1996, all his works of fiction are published in Finland and are written in Finnish language (before publishing in any other languages or in any other countries). Literary scholars in Finland consider Sahlberg’s fiction as a kind of neo- existentialism or new psychological realism; the influence of such authors as Albert Camus or Fyodor Dostoyevsky is obvious in most of his novels (Kirstinä and Turunen 64–65). Furthermore, it is argued that his novels combine, in an original manner, the elements and devices of realism, modernism, and postmodernism without clearly being representative of any of them, and thus his novels also avoid belonging to either of these periods, styles, or genres (Hallila 53). The main themes of Sahlberg’s novels are such topics as the solitude of man, especially the feelings of being an outsider, the theme of fate and chance, and especially the theme of temporality (Hallila 44–45). When Herodes was published, Sahlberg was already an established author to whose œuvre this novel brought change. As similar to the conventional historical novels (e. g. the historical novels of Mika Waltari), it differs in many ways from the earlier works of the author. Nevertheless, there are still many traces left of the Sahlbergian themes listed above—they can be found “under the surface” of the conventional narrative since thematically Herodes is an extremely multi-level novel of history. The main character and the first-person narrator of Herodes is the tetrarch Herod Antipas, son of the Jewish King Herod the Great. Herod Antipas is a well-known character in the history of Christianity, and he is famous especially from the Bible’s story of the beheading of John the Baptist. In the Bible, Herod is the king who gives the decapitated head of the Prophet to the Princess Salome who had asked him for it. Naturally, this famous incident is significant also in this contemporary historical novel telling the life of the tetrarch Antipas. As Herodes, however, is a very long and rich historical novel in which the decapitation of John the Baptist is only a few pages long episode, it is not at all the main motif of the novel. As a narrator and as a character of the novel, the tetrarch Herod Antipas is an ambivalent person who, on one hand, tries to do good deeds for his people, but who, on the other hand, uses an unlimited power arbitrarily and is able to destroy and kill whomever he wants without consequences. According to my interpretation, he represents at the same time the ancient sovereign and the (post)modern subject; Herod often thinks and feels as a contemporary man but acts like an ancient sovereign: like a modern man, he suffers because of the social inequality and inequity, and at the same time as an Retelling Salome : Asko Sahlberg’s Herodes 165 ancient despotic king he is ready to destroy anyone who opposes him. The choice of this royal character-narrator from ancient history is aimed at addressing the characteristic Sahlbergian themes of temporality, solitude, fate and chance, but also the themes of power and violence. More importantly, this ambivalence of the first-person narrator is an effective narrative strategy producing an original and unconventional viewpoint to the well-known story of the rise of Christianity. Within this narrative strategy and within the fictional and rhetorical frames it offers, the novel retells and rewrites also the story of the Princess Salome. The competing stories of Salome The Princess Salome is only a minor character in Herodes. However, she plays an important role in the whole narrative since the events of the night when John is executed define a lot of what Herod narrates about himself and also the way in which he narrates his story. The destiny of John the Baptist influences Herod’s thoughts, acts, and the relationships with the other people, it influences his whole life. In fact, the events of the execution night have impact on the whole narrative from the beginning to the end. Hence, even if she plays a minor role and even if there are considerable changes made to her part in the episode, Salome contributes significantly to the course of events. In this paper, in order to interpret how and why Salome’s story is retold, I will first contextualize Salome and her story into the tradition of the former representations and within the intertexts of the narrative, and thus I will, as a first step of the analysis, dig into the background of our enigmatic princess. After that, I will analyze those episodes of Herodes in which the story of the Princess Salome is told. From the very beginning of her textual and intertextual existence, the Princess Salome is an especially enigmatic character of the narratives of two Gospels in the New Testament. She is famous especially because of her dance to Herod and Herod’s birthday guests and because of her wish to get to see the decapitated head of John the Baptist on the platter as a reward for the dance. Due to both dancing and demanding the head of the Prophet, the influence of Salome as a character and also as a symbol became in the Western culture much more significant than her small role in the short biblical episode. In the New Testament, both Mark and Matthew speak about Salome’s dance and demand when they narrate the story of the beheading of John the Baptist. Both of the gospels tell how the unnamed daughter of the tetrarch Herod dances for Herod’s birthday guests, and how she asks for the head of John the Baptist as a reward for the dance. Indeed, the Gospels do not mention the name of the dancing Princess but the historiographical writings recognize her as the Princess Salome, the daughter of Herodias, and the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas. Also in this sense, as unnamed, Salome is a mysterious character of the biblical narrative.

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