Puhetta kuolleelle
Puhuttelu ja kiintymyssuhteen jatkuminen Paavo Haavikon, Aale Tynnin ja Anja Vammelvuon elegioissa
Abstract
Speaking to the Dead: Poetic Address and Continuing Attachment in Elegies by Paavo Haavikko, Aale Tynni, and Anja Vammelvuo
This article focuses on the addressment of the deceased in Finnish elegies from the late 1960s and the early 70s written by Paavo Haavikko, Aale Tynni and Anja Vammelvuo to commemorate their spouses. Until recently, the psychoanalytical theory of grief has been in uential among scholars of elegy. This article, however, aims to revise this dominant paradigm by applying a more up-to-date understanding of grief – the continuing bonds model – to the study of elegiac poetry.
In contrast to the psychoanalytical theory of grief, the continuing bonds model emphasizes that relationships with the deceased are continued rather than abandoned; people do not recover from experience of loss, rather, the mourner renegotiates his or her relationship to the deceased. In the elegies analysed in this article, addressing the deceased is used to express the mourning speaker’s experiences of presence as well as the absence of the person passed. The differences in coping with and expressing grief are partly connected to gender in the analysed poems; Haavikko’s male speaker is more reluctant to openly grieve than Tynni’s and Vammelvuo’s female speakers, who beg their spouses to come back and who can feel the presence – and in Vammelvuo’s case, even the touch of the deceased. However, in all these cases the speakers try to make sense of their continuing relationship to the dead person in their present life.
