Kognitiivinen realismi, kömpelö ruumis ja kielen todellisuus Mikko Rimmisen Pölkyssä

• Maria Mäkelä Tampereen yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74972

Abstrakti

Cognitive Realism, Awkward Body and the Reality of Language in Mikko Rimminen’s Pölkky

The article provides an analysis of the relationship between language and embodied reality in Mikko Rimminen’s Pölkky (2007). I claim that this novel, labeled as markedly experimental and metafictional in criticism, is in fact able to expand our notion of literary realism. In a phenomenological sense, Pölkky is a detailed and embodied account of what it is like to inhabit the storyworld, and as such, it seems to pertain to the cognitive-narratological notion of literary realism as immersive storyworlds inviting readers to embodied participation.

However, I argue that Rimminen’s oeuvre partakes in the Flaubertian tradition of unmotivated or perceptually problematic realistic descriptions, and as such, it problematizes the ”easy access” ideology inscribed in contemporary cognitive narratology. In spite of the neurotically detailed descriptions and the narrator’s urge to immerse himself as well as his readers in Pölkky’s storyworld, the novel distorts the relationship between language and embodied reality. Thus the article not only applies but also criticises cognitive-narratological approaches to narrative and embodiment.

A close analysis of Pölkky’s descriptions, focalization, embodied metaphors and the motive of the impaired body highlights my general theoretical point: in narrative literature, it is precisely the discrepancies between language, body and mind that trigger interpretation; thus my approach juxtaposes itself with prototypical cognitive-narratological readings that foreground universal sense-making strategies in embodied experience and in reading literature.