Moniääninen Moreeni. Referointi ja moniäänisyys Lauri Viidan Moreenissa

Abstract

Referointi ja moniäänisyys Lauri Viidan Moreenissa

Vuonna 1950 ilmestyneessä Lauri Viidan Moreenissa kuvataan Tampereen Pispalassa asuvan Niemisen monilapsisen perheen elämää Suomen sisällissotaa edeltävästä ajasta 1930-luvun lama-aikaan. FL Anneli Niinimäen väitöstutkimuksessa Moniääninen Moreeni tarkastellaan Viidan esikoisromaania kielitieteen keinoin.

Tutkimus nostaa esiin moniäänisyyden Moreenin kielen leimallisena piirteenä. Moniäänisyys tarkoittaa referoidun puheen dialogisuutta sekä muita ilmiöitä, joilla moniäänisyys tuotetaan: intertekstuaalisuutta, ironiaa, metakielisiä ilmauksia, retorisia kysymyksiä ja epäsymmetrisiä luetteloita.

Moreenin intertekstuaalisuus on hyvin raamattupainotteista. Pispalan rakentamista kuvataan “Luojan palikkaleikiksi korkealle moreenipenkereelle” ja talousjärjestelmä nimitetään “siksi maallisen hyvän- ja pahantiedonpuuksi, johon ei ollut lupa kajota”. Moreeni onkin yksi niistä suomalaisista romaaneista, joiden kieleen Raamattu on vaikuttanut voimakkaasti.

Ironia on Moreenissa runsaasti käytetty huumorin laji. Koko sisällissotaa kuvaava jakso on ironisten merkitysten värittämää kerrontaa, esimerkiksi lauseissa “Ei ollut puutetta sankareista. Ei ollut puutetta hurjista jutuista, leivästä vain oli puute.” Eri vuosikymmeninä julkaistujen sisällissotaa käsittelevien teosten joukkoon Moreeni asettuu omaleimaisena, realistisesta kuvausperinteestä poikkeavana.

Teoksen referointikeinojen analyysi johtaa tarkastelemaan puheen ja ajatusten referointia uusista näkökulmista. Vapaan epäsuoran esityksen tutkimustulokset vahvistavat näkemystä, että esitysmuodon rajaus vain täysin johtolauseettomiin referaatteihin jättäisi ulkopuolelle monia tapauksia, joissa sekä kertojan ääni että henkilön ääni kuuluvat jonkinasteisina. Myös rajan vetäminen kertojan puheen ja referoinnin välille on tulkinnallinen asia. Tarkka puheen rajaaminen ei olekaan Moreenin kerronnassa itsestäänselvyys, vaan sumeudella on funktionsa, kuten kertojan osuuden korostaminen.

Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan Moreenin jaksottaista kerrontaa lausetta laajemmissa merkitysyksiköissä, <i>tekstijaksoissa</i>. Tekstijaksoja ovat muun muassa erilaisin referointitavoin toteutetut dialogit, kertojan tai henkilöiden monologit sekä toiminnan kuvauksen jaksot. Lukija voi tiivistää jaksolle otsikkomaisen merkityksen, mikä auttaa hahmottamaan moniteemaisen teoksen merkityksiä.

Moreeni on kerrontatavoiltaan varsin nykyaikainen romaani. Viidalla on omat keinonsa yhdistää ulkoinen ja sisäinen näkökulma niin, että kertojan läsnäolo saa monenlaisia variaatioita. Modernismin ja ylipäätään nykyaikaisen romaanin piirteisiin kuuluvat myös kielen asettaminen itsenäiseen asemaan todellisuuteen nähden, rakenteen jaksomaisuus ja teemojen syklimäinen kuljetus. Moreeni on yksi niistä klassikkoteoksista, jotka ansaitsisivat yhä uusia lukijoita. Teoksesta olisi tärkeää ottaa uusintapainos, ettei saatavuus olisi kirjastoista ja kodeista löytyvien harvenevien kappaleiden varassa.

REPORTED SPEECH AND POLYPHONY IN LAURI VIITA’S MOREENI Anneli Niinimäki University of Tampere, Finland

The present study in the field of linguistics analyses one piece of literature, Lauri Viita’s 1950 novel <i>Moreeni</i>. Lauri Viita (1916–1965), who first gained recognition as a poet, is an author known for testing and breaking the norms of language, and his first novel <i>Moreeni</i> has been characterised with the epithet ‘poet’s prose’. Recounting the life of the Nieminen family with multiple children in the Pispala neighbourhood in Tampere, the novel depicts the times from before the Finnish Civil War of 1918 until the time of the economic depression of the 1930s. First characterised as an episodic novel, <i>Moreeni</i> received plenty of attention and critical acclaim at the time of its publishing. Even though it is considered to be one of the most significant 1950s Finnish novels, <i>Moreeni</i> has not gained much attention in literature research. I chose to analyse polyphony (Finnish: <i>moniäänisyys</i>), a distinctive feature of the text. The concept of polyphony is defined, according to the research tradition in Finnish Language Studies, as dialogical features in reported speech, and other features of the text that create polyphony: intertextuality, irony, expressions in metalanguage, rhetorical questions, and asymmetrical lists (zeugmas). In addition to this definition, I analysed <i>Moreeni</i> as a polyphonic novel, as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin, in which the multiplicity of parallel subjects and their equality are acknowledged. This study shows that polyphony forms the essential basis of Viita’s unique use of language. The analysis of polyphony presents new possibilities for the Finnish language to create meaningful content. The intertextuality in <i>Moreeni</i>, as well as in Viita’s poems, is mainly biblical, for instance in the following sentences: <i>Niin tuli yö ja päivä ja jälleen pimeä. Pakoretki alkoi. [And there was night and there was day and dark again. The escape began.] </i>It is worth noting that Viita is one of the Finnish writers whose language use is highly influenced by <i>The Bible</i>.

Irony and satire are devices often employed in Viita’s work. Of these two, <i>Moreeni</i> shows substantially more irony, concealing the intentional element of the speaker. Most frequent ways of expressing irony are exaggeration, negation, wordplay, production of syntactic incongruence, use of exclamatory and interrogative sentences, metalinguistic reflection of meanings, and intertextual references. In addition, irony is essential for the structure of the novel. The narrative in the whole passage about the Civil War contains polyphony and is coloured by ironic overtones, as in the following sentences: <i>Ei ollut puutetta sankareista. Ei ollut puutetta hurjista jutuista, leivästä vain oli puute. [There was no lack of heroes. There was no lack of wild stories, only bread was lacking.] </i>Moreeni is one of the countless works from many decades that are set at the time of the Civil War. However, as a novel with such distinctive features, it differs from the conventional Finnish, mainly realist, literary style.

There is a visible layer throughout <i>Moreeni</i> where the focus is on language itself and its capabilities. If a conventional expression does not fit, a new one can be created, such as <i>pyykkivuorokausi [laundry day and night] or pulasyyllinen [depression criminal, cf. war criminal]. </i>These are instances that comment on socio-cultural values. By posing rhetorical questions, the narrator steps out of the role of the story-teller, turning straight to the reader and dialoguing with him/her. Polyphony is also based on the way the narrator acknowledges the presuppositions that accompany the expression. Although the sentences do not necessarily contain voices from two texts, they contain voices from two or more ideologies. The questions <i>Kuinka monta äitiä mahtoikaan valvoa koko yön! Ja milloin, milloin oli tuleva loppu niistä kauhujen öistä? [I wonder how many a mother stayed up the whole night! And when, when were those nights of terror going to end?]</i> carry references of the mothers’ pain and the terrors of war. I also consider the lists formed by asymmetric comparison to be structures that create polyphony because by those means, the speaker creates a new ideology and provides the reader with a chance for a new kind of polyphonic interpretation: <i>Verenhukka oli liian suuri, hevonen ja lääkäri eivät voineet siirtää kuolemista sunnuntaiaamua pitemmälle. [Blood loss was too severe, the horse and the doctor could not postpone his dying past Sunday morning.]</i> Analysing reported speech in the novel provides information on the language of Moreeni and Lauri Viita, as well as information on the possibilities the Finnish language offers for reporting speech and thought. I analysed the act of reporting from the perspective that it encompasses a continuum of types. Since indirect speech is virtually absent in <i>Moreeni</i>, the analysis section focuses on free indirect speech, direct speech, and free direct speech. Even drawing a line between <i>diegesis</i> and <i>mimesis</i> (narrator’s speech and reported speech) is a matter of interpretation. Another notion is the difficulty of setting boundaries between different types of reported speech, even between direct and indirect, but especially in situations that contain free indirect speech. Indeed, rigid categorisation of speech types is not self-explanatory in the narrative of <i>Moreeni</i>: a certain level of ambiguity has its function, for instance in emphasising the narrator’s role and breaking the narrator’s outsider position. A particularly multi-faceted category is free indirect speech, definition and use for which the novel gives new insight.

Free indirect speech is an interesting structure in <i>Moreeni</i> because many of the occasions I categorised as free indirect speech are found outside the conventional linguistic boundaries defined in Finnish Language Studies. The speech type is difficult to define syntactically alone as having a structure that lacks an introductory expression, and the term free does not seem justified because in many cases the narrator’s point-of-view is not entirely absent in the act of reporting. The analysis of <i>Moreeni</i> emphasises the view that defining reported speech only by the lack of introductory expression would leave out many cases that express in-text polyphony with both the narrator’s and the character’s voice somewhat audible. Free indirect speech can be defined in a variety of ways, also according to whether the voices of the narrator and the character merge or remain separate. The analysis of Moreeni reveals that the voices of the narrator and the character merge in different levels. In free indirect speech, the voices of the narrator and the character(s) are clearly separate. In other instances the voices merge, which makes the voices, in Bakhtin’s terms, polyphonically equal. The fact that the voice of the character is present in the narrator’s speech is also a sign of modern narration techniques. For the purposes of outlining the above-sentence level structures of Moreeni, I chose as my tool<i> the unit of period</i> (Finnish: <i>tekstijakso</i>), based on the changes in the narrator’s speech and in reported speech. It is a tool with which I describe the narration in a novel with polyphony and multiple perspectives. From the basis of propositions and macro-propositions that emerge from propositions, the reader can summarise a passage to a heading-like meaning, an upper-level macro-proposition that ties a period together with the themes and the ideologies of the novel. Some of the periods consist of scenes of action where the character’s and the narrator’s voices are present. However, the description of action is interrupted by the numerous monologues of the narrator or a character, and the characters’ dialogues. In these passages, the stream in the storyline is interrupted. The monologues of the narrator and the character have different functions in the narration. The narrator’s monologues have a purpose of orienting the whole novel and its main chapters. In addition, the cosmic, biblical definition of time in the narrator’s monologues transfers the passages above the rest of the narration. The characters’ monologues describe the events in the world of the story or represent a shift to another reality. The dialogue passages are realised in different ways, from dialogues reported as free direct speech to dialogues of multiple characters represented in different types of reporting. The characters and their stories form a meticulously designed whole in the novel. The view in prior literature research on three equal points of view—father Iisakki, mother Joosefiina and youngest son Erkki—is further defined through the analysis of reporting types. The analysis of the narrator’s direct description of characters and the analysis of reporting highlight Iisakki as a more central character than others. He is on the spotlight the most, and the world is seen from his mental perspective, which is seen in numerous monologues by Iisakki and the narrator, represented in free indirect speech. In addition, the dialogues reported from Iisakki’s point of view have a strong connection to the central themes of the novel. In the direct descriptions by the narrator, Joosefiina is portrayed similarly to the ideal mother in Viita’s poem <i>Alfhild</i>. Colloquialisms are not widely used in <i>Moreeni</i> to portray the characters, but in Joosefiina’s direct speech, it is made clear that she is not familiar with the expressions in standard language. Erkki’s story is about the difficulties in social mobility: his rise from working class to an educated person does not succeed, and whether he succeeds to be an artist remains a mystery. Compared to prior research, I give Kalle a more highlighted status than the rest of the children in the family. His seemingly relaxed dialogues build an ideology in the novel that represents the success of the common working people. Kalle’s disappearing from the family out to the sea, and especially his crawling inside the ship’s great boiler can be compared to the passages in the novel that describe the characters drifting outside their own consciousness: Joosefiina’s dream, Iisakki’s escape to his fantasies, and Erkki’s rowboat trip. Different ways of reporting and different kinds of polyphony have a connection to the themes of the novel. For instance, the theme of emphasising the significance of family is carried as direct speech in two-person dialogues. The theme of belief and non-belief is carried with all types of reported speech, from monologues to direct speech with a biblical, ironic tone. The futility of war is shown as parody, coloured by multi-voice dialogues where along the narrator’s voice the voices of the Red Guard soldiers and a collective voice of the common people are heard. These themes lead to the main theme of the novel, a level of the highest macro-proposition. Literature research has classified the novel by its themes as either a civil war novel, a working class novel, or a social novel. However, none of these classifications are all-inclusive. Therefore, I shall not classify the novel according to any of these themes; I consider the civil war and the sociality to form only one theme subordinate to the main theme. On the basis of my analysis of the language and the narrative of the novel I shall give the main macro-proposition and the main theme the following label: <i>a person as creator of worlds</i>. The theme of creation is carried through <i>Moreeni</i> in different variations, both as a festive, mythological concept and as an everyday action in the narrator’s speech and in the characters’ dialogues. The numerous allusions in the novel specifically refer to the story of creation in <i>The Bible</i>. Moreeni was published in the 1950s at a turning point when Modernism challenged the dominating literary tradition of Realism. Viita’s novel has not been universally situated in either of these two styles because it is considered to have features from both Realism and Modernism. I give emphasis to the voice of the omniscient narrator of the novel, heard in monologues, in straight descriptions of characters and numerous predictions. However, on the basis of the author’s linguistic choices, I assert that the mental state of the narrator is not constant: the narrator can move from the story world to the linguistic level, or move to be a part of the story-world, for instance with a use of the dramatic present. Such type of multiplicity of the narrator is more a modern feature than a feature of a realist novel. Another feature of Modernism is that language is given an independent status in relation to reality. The episodic structure, along with the cyclical carrying of multiple themes throughout the novel is a feature that positions <i>Moreeni </>towards a Modernist style of narration.