Harhaanjohtamisen ja yhdistelyn estetiikka Sally Salmisen romaanissa Prins Efflam

• Irma Perttula Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74845

Abstract

The Aesthetics of Misleading and Fusion in Sally Salminen’s Novel Prins Efflam

This article analyses and interprets the novel Prins Efflam (1953) by Sally Salminen within the context of the grotesque. In the beginning of the novel one 19-year old, humpbacked Breton girl finds a shipwrecked young man on the shore. The man remembers nothing from his past. Who is he really? Already in the first chapter the young man bears a striking resemblance to Christ and the novel begins to take the shape of a Christ legend. Thus at first the direction in the novel is not towards the grotesque but towards the sublime. There are, however, some episodes in the narrative that do not seem to integrate with the Christ legend, but revelations of the shipwrecked young man’s past emerge only in the last part of the novel. These revelations do not allow the reader (who is still following his strong first interpretation), to orientate himself to the new confusing situation, where the Christ legend, hitherto given as true, suddenly turns into an anti-legend.

Prins Efflam is an example of the scarcely researched type of storytelling which Manfred Jahn has named as the garden-path narrative. Misleading the reader and providing an unexpected twist in the plot that requires a radical reinterpretation of the preceding passages are characteristic traits of the garden-path narrative.

In the novel Prins Efflam the grotesque is based exactly on the shocking fusion of incongruous elements not only regarding the protagonist, but the whole novel which is based both on the unresolvable clash between the beginning and the ending, and on the betrayal of the reader’s expectations.