Hannu Salaman v-tyyli

metafiktiivisyys osana realistisen romaanin uudistumista 1970-luvulla

Abstrakti

Hannu Salama’s V style Metafictivity as a factor in remodeling the realistic novel in the 1970’s

This article examines Hannu Salama’s novels Siinä näkijä missä tekijä (1972) and Kosti Herhiläisen perunkirjoitus (1976) as realistic and metafictive novels. The main argument is that metafictive devices do not necessarily lead to exclusion of mimesis and realism, as the most categorical views suggest, but they can become a part of the remodeled realistic novel. According to Patricia Waugh (1985) fiction that is based on realistic conventions but at the same time lays them bare critically and resourcefully can be called ”new realism”.

In Salama’s novels metafiction is manifested primarily in explicit and thematized diegetic form, ”mimesis of the process” (Hutcheon 1984). In Salama’s novels it is used mainly to question truthfulness and validity of (ideological) grand narratives and traditional conventions of social (working-class) realism. This is connected with postmodern changes in society, culture and ways of thinking but not with postmodernism.

Idea of metafiction as a part of realistic novel suggests also that literary realism is a more flexible mode than most traditional and poststructuralist theories propose. But reconsidered from Bertolt Brecht’s point of view realistic writing turns out to be constantly updating critical practice with no predestined form. It can also include brechtian alienation effects (V-effekt) which actually are metafictive elements. And if language is viewed as both referential (maintaining ”will to reference”) and (self-)reflexive, like Mihail Bakhtin suggested, metafictive features do not mean incompatibility with realism at all.