Kun sissiltä meni hermot

Paavo Rintalan Sissiluutnantin epäluotettava kertoja

• Sari Salin Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74688

Abstrakti

Guerilla Goes Insane The Unreliable Narrator in Paavo Rintala’s Guerilla Lieutenant

The 1960’s in postwar Finland was an era of many literary controversies that sometimes have even been called “literary wars”. Rintala’s novel Guerilla Lieutenant (Sissiluutnantti, 1963) not just depicted struggles during the war between Finland and The Soviet Union, but also evoked literary “struggles”, as Pekka Tarkka has described (1966). Particularly the way Rintala’s novel depicted women at the front, that is the members of women’s auxiliary corps (Lotta Svärd Organization), upset the patriotic circles and many other readers, too. It was not noticed, however, that the conception of women in the novel belongs to the first person narrator and is, therefore, highly subjective. The narrative structure in Guerilla Lieutenant has not been understood by the readers nor by the scholars. Takala is a first person (homodiegetic) narrator, and the fictional world of the novel is delivered through him only. What is more, the text hints very strongly that Takala has gone insane; in other words, he is a text book example of a classical unreliable narrator. Therefore, the mimetic interpretation of Rintala’s novel is not a relevant one. Takala is a member of a special group (“guerillas”) and suffers some kind of posttraumatic stress disorder. Consequently, he has lost his ability to lead a normal life. Takala’s mental problems are most obvious in his sexually straightforward encounters with the women at the front. In these episodes Takala depicts the women as voluptuous monsters with only one wish: to copulate with the narrator. These episodes were the primary ones to cause the controversies. Nevertheless, there are hints in the narrator’s account, for instance the animal metaphors that disclose the narrator’s fantasies about being hunted by the dreadful “lotta” women.

Secondly, but equally importantly, the article focuses on the signification and the varied conceptions and theories about unreliable narration, notion that was originally created by Wayne C. Booth (1961). The article starts by introducing Ansgar Nünning’s (1997, 1999) new definition of “unreliable narrator” that copes well without the notorious but still persistent notion of the “implied author”, again created by Booth. According to Booth’s definition, the narrator is unreliable if he/she does not speak or act in accordance with the norms and values of the implied author. By contrast, Nünning rejects the obscure notion of the implied author and believes that unreliability would be more comprehensible if the narrator’s norms and values were compared to the norms and values of the textual whole instead of those of the implied author. Thirdly, the article comments on the recent polemics between Nünning and James Phelan (2005), who most eagerly defends the concept of implied author. Nevertheless, the problem with the notion of the implied author is not just its obscurity but the fact that it is always linked to the flesh-and-blood author. Thus, it seems to carry a conception that a novel has only one correct meaning intended by its author.