Editorial

Against time?

Anachronisms are interesting. There are plenty of examples across the centuries in the arts — literature and the visual arts in particular. Volumes have been written about Shakespeare’s anachronisms, such  as  striking clocks in Julius Caesar’s Rome. When the Master had left us and his texts began to be examined in earnest, the criticism began.

An early defender of the Bard was the literary critic Lewis Theobald, who wrote in his Preface to the Works of Shakespeare (1734): ‘A Reader of Taste may easily observe, that tho’ Shakespeare almost in every Scene of his historical Plays, commits the grossest Offences against Chronology, History, and Antient Politicks; yet This was not thro’ Ignorance, as is generally supposed, but thro’ the too powerful Blaze of his Imagination; which, when once raised, made all acquired Knowledge vanish and disappear before it.  [such] Anachronisms were the Effect of poetic Licence....‘

In contemporary entertainment a lot of money, has, of course, been made with comic anachronisms. The eponymous opportunistic creep of the British comic actor Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder  television series cavorts unhindered through, for example, an indefinite Georgian England somewhere around the turn of the 19th century; the historical characters and dates generally do not add up. (The episodes have names such as  ‘Dish and Dishonesty‘, ‘Ink and Incapability’ tai ‘Sense and Senility’.)

The ancient  Greek ana + kronos means simply ‘against time’. An anachronism is a representation of something appearing in other than chronological, historical or otherwise proper order. In this issue of Books from Finland Lauri Sihvonen writes in his introduction (pp. 248—250)  to Tuomas Kyrö’s novel Benjamin Kivi (see page 264) that in Finland, ‘with its staunch tradition of realism, postmodernistic fabulisms [such as anachronisms] are rare’; and that ‘the details connected with Finnish wars, in particular, are examined under a magnifying lens.’

Kyrö cuts a swathe through the period of Finnish independence, beginning in 1917, the main character being Benjamin Kivi, hard as nails, who has decided to realise in his life his own kind of American Dream — success  at any price. Kyrö’s language and historical details are anachronistic, and in the wildest turns of the novel the reader is expected to accept the ‘Effects of poetic Licence’ — and in doing so, will be richly rewarded, I dare say. The anachronisms open a perspective on today.

The first generation of authors writing in Finnish were realists: they demanded of their art faithfulness to reality, and used it to expose injustices, which in the 19th century was indeed necessary. But it might be high time to accept more easily and more broadly works characterised by a ‘powerful Blaze of Imagination’.

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Finland has just celebrated its 90th anniversary as an independent state. In several articles in this issue we discuss Finnishness and Finland, the decades of independence and what it is like to live here now. The tight monoculture of a small nation is inevitably already a thing in the past. The Israel-born Finnish Arab Umayya Abu-Hanna describes her own Finnishness (see page 287). Lars Sund’s new novel En lycklig liten ö (‘A happy little island’, see page 252)  explores a small community in which ‘happiness’ is linked with smugness.  

In his column Jyrki Lehtola mocks the everlasting desire of the Finns to be mentioned in flattering contexts abroad. Congratulated or self-congratulating , we Finns should spend less time worrying whether we look good in the eyes of the rest of the world, and more whether we do good, in particular to all those who live here, either by choice, by chance or ancestry.

We wish our readers a peaceful and prosperous new year. Stay with us!

Soila Lehtonen
Editor-in-Chief