126 Bo Carpelan's Richly Textured Novel, Urwind, and Mikhail

126 BRIAN KENNEDY (editor) – Voicing Bo Carpelan: Bo Carpelan’s richly textured novel, Urwind, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s subtle theories of discourse are brought together in this stimulating and sophisticated collection of essays. The contributors approach Carpelan’s work using all the ideas Bakhtin has placed at their disposal – dialogism, chronotope, carnival, polyphony, the unfinishedness of novels – but in an inquiring and open, rather than merely deferential, spirit. The result is one of the most interesting and subtle discussions of Bakhtin’s relationship to modernist prose we have seen, a book that sheds light on Bakhtin’s work as well Carpelan’s. Ken Hirschkop, Professor of English, University of Waterloo, author of Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy and The Cambridge Introduction to Bakhtin Finnish writer Bo Carpelan (1926-2011) gained unparalleled recognition amongst Finland-Swedish readers at home and Urwind’s others worldwide for his work as a poet and novelist. Yet despite a good deal of his literary output having been translated into English, surprisingly little critical commentary exists for the Possibilities Dialogic English reader. This study seeks to fill that gap, discovering as it does the dialogic possibilities inherent in Carpelan’s work. Eight scholars separately embarked on a common challenge: to use the critical methodology of Mikhail Bakhtin to read Carpelan’s novel Urwind, which won the Finlandia Prize in 1993. The resulting discussions take on topics from art and music to time, to the borders between genres, as well as humanistic geography and the thematic of mid-life, many times stretching past Urwind to touch on other of Carpelan’s texts. NYKYKULTTUURIN TUTKIMUSKESKUKSEN JULKAISUJA 126 VOICING BO CARPELAN Copyright © Authors and the Research Centre for Contemporary Culture Editor-in-Chief Urpo Kovala (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) Managing Editors Pekka Hassinen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) Laura Piippo (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) Editorial Board Eoin Devereux (University of Limerick, Ireland); Irma Hirsjärvi (University of Jyväskylä, Finland); Sanna Karkulehto (University of Jyväskylä, Finland); Raine Koskimaa (University of Jyväskylä, Finland); Hanna Kuusela (Tampere University, Finland); Katariina Kyrölä (Åbo Akademi University, Finland); Maaria Linko (University of Helsinki, Finland); Olli Löytty (University of Turku, Finland); Jim McGuigan (Loughborough University, United Kingdom); Jussi Ojajärvi (University of Oulu, Finland); Tarja Pääjoki (University of Jyväskylä, Finland); Leena-Maija Rossi (University of Helsinki, Finland); Tuija Saresma (University of Jyväskylä, Finland); Piia Varis (Universiteit Tilburg, Netherlands); Juhana Venäläinen (University of Eastern Finland) The Research Centre for Contemporary Culture is part of the Department of Music, Art and Culture studies at the University of Jyväskylä. The publication series was started in 1986. The series is multi and interdisciplinary, and it publishes studies on contemporary culture and cultural theory. This does not exclude a historical point of view; works on cultural and social history are acceptable in so far as they relate to the birth or phases of modern culture. Manuscripts are considered for publication on the basis of expert review. The publication series uses a double-blind peer review system. The manuscripts may be in Finnish, Swedish, or English. The volumes are published in print (additionally online after 6 months of initial publication) or online. Print editions are available for order at the website of the publication series at https://www.jyu.fi/hytk/fi/laitokset/mutku/tutkimus/nykykulttuurin- tutkimuskeskus/nykykulttuuri-julkaisusarja or from the Managing Editor. All correspondence, including subscriptions, should be sent to Laura Piippo, Re- search Centre for Contemporary Culture, P.O. Box 35, FIN-40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Email: [email protected], Tel. + 358 40 548 64 44. The publications are also sold in well-equipped bookshops and University of Jyväskylä Web Store. Layout: Pekka Hassinen Layout design: Sami Saresma Cover: Sami Saresma Printed at Jyväskylän yliopistopaino Jyväskylä 2020 ISBN 978-951-39-7930-0 ISSN 1457-6899 NYKYKULTTUURIN TUTKIMUSKESKUKSEN JULKAISUJA 126 JYVÄSKYLÄN YLIOPISTO 2020 TABLE OF CONTENTS Brian Kennedy INTRODUCTION: “A HIDDEN, MAGIC MEANING”— VOICING BO CARPELAN’S URWIND 7 Stephen Souris “A CONFUSING AND WONDERFUL MOSAIC”: DIALOGIC ASPECTS OF BO CARPELAN’S URWIND 29 Roger Holmström BO CARPELAN AND MULTIVOICEDNESS: URWIND IN LIGHT OF BAKHTIN’S THOUGHTS ON METHODOLOGY FOR THE STUDY OF THE NOVEL 63 Erkki Vainikkala URWIND: A NOVEL IN POETIC PROSE AS A BAKHTINIAN LIMIT CASE 77 Brian Kennedy “ANOTHER, MORE DISSATISFIED AND TRUTHFUL PERSON”: DANIEL URWIND ON THE THRESHOLD OF MID-LIFE IN BO CARPELAN’S URWIND 113 Pauli Tapani Karjalainen PLACE IN URWIND: A HUMANISTIC GEOGRAPHICAL VIEW 139 Nanny Jolma BETWEEN NOW AND THEN: THE EXPERIENCE OF TIME IN BO CARPELAN’S NOVELS URWIND AND BERG 157 Catherine Maloney SELF AND OTHER: “CREATIVE UNDERSTANDING” IN BO CARPELAN’S URWIND 177 Peter Hitchcock AFTERWORD: CARPELAN VOICING 195 AUTHOR NOTES 203 Brian Kennedy INTRODUCTION: “A HIDDEN, MAGIC MEANING”— VOICING BO CARPELAN’S URWIND What’s the harm in coming to the work of a gifted writer more or less by accident? If confessions were being taken, several of the authors in this volume did just that with Bo Carpelan (1926–2011). The idea for the book was conceived, as so many projects in aca- demia are, as a conference panel, the goal being for four scholars to study the novel Urwind (1993) independent of each other but with the theories of Mikhail Bakhtin as their lens. The panel presentation, then, was hoped to celebrate both the synchronicity and the juxtapositions of ideas which would result. The conference in ques- tion would take place in Finland, which is why Carpelan’s text was chosen. In particular, it was the Twelfth International Bakhtin Con- ference, held in the summer of 2005. The result was both what was hoped for, and more. Core Bakhtinian ideas coalesced on the panel: the dialogic aspects of the novel were primary. Its presentation of a chronotope—identified as modernist, but not slavishly so— was remarked upon. The poetic aspects of the text, its flights of language, the thematic core of family breakdown—all of these were cross-referenced from paper to paper. But as conference papers can be, these were alive with possibilities not fully explored. It was hoped that the four papers would form the dynamic core of a larger study, and that is what has happened in this book—albe- it with only three of the essays having ultimately been put into full- length form. Alongside these come several more pieces which ex- pand the scope of interpretation as they range across Urwind and other of Carpelan’s fictional works to discover his many possibilities, but with the core methodology owing itself, mostly explicitly but in a couple of cases more implicitly, to Bakhtin. As such, this collection gives voice to a set of theories, and they to a set of interpretations, which are dynamic in relationship to each other, and certainly one of the concerns of the editor is to make a meaningful contribution in an area which has been underserved to this point— to the body of scholarship on Carpelan in English. As any such study would, this book seeks to create a dialogue, in the fullest sense of the word. It is dialogic in that it invites the reader to participate in its meaning-making. As such, it is unfinished, or to use the term Bakhtin would have preferred, “unfinalized”. It will be a success in the moment that readers find themselves thinking past the Carpelan texts treated to other ones, and thinking past all of Carpelan’s work to that of others in his Finland-Swedish tradi- tion and to other contemporary writers. Language will be, of neces- sity, a limiting factor in this endeavor, since only selections of Car- pelan’s work, and very little criticism on his oeuvre, are translated into English, or exist in English in the first place, a point to which I will return presently. For the novel itself, dialogism is a primary Bakhtinian concept, indeed axiomatic in defining the genre. Yet, as Peter Hitchcock presents in the afterword to this volume, dialogism is not just a charac- teristic of the genre, or even its defining principle, but rather a practice which finds itself alive within any text which can be claimed as “novelistic” and also a result of any two people’s encounters with such a text. As such, this book is a discourse with all the push-pull characteristics that dialogism presents. It uses Urwind as a model text, in that sense, to demonstrate that any novel could be read as an event—its eventness performed by readers alone but also represent- ed, in the present context, by the critical volume which it inspires —noting here that most of the essays in this book treat Carpelan’s Urwind as their primary text. Those who were part of the original conference panel (Vainik- kala, Kennedy, and Souris) thought that their interpretations of Ur- wind might converge. That would have proved narrowing, and in fact, the readings diverged, pointing in multiple directions, two of which I would like to note at present: to Carpelan’s dialogic possibilities, and to a catalogue of the fullness of Bakhtin’s ideas available for critics. The essays added to the collection have further done this, with yet more Bakhtinian possibilities. Perhaps the reader, par- Nykykulttuuri 126 8 ticularly one familiar with Bakhtin’s critical canon, could come up with further interpretations still. That, in turn, would point to the complexity and beauty of Carpelan’s novel, and indeed past that to the richness of his work as a whole. But it would also indicate the continued richness of Bakhtinian interpretations, and the continued relevance of dialogism as a practice.

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