Kielen etualaistuminen nonsense-tekstin piirteenä Kari Hotakaisen teoksissa Lastenkirja ja Satukirja

• Maria Laakso Tampereen yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74932

Abstract

The Foregrounding of Language as a Feature of Literary Non¬sense in Kari Hotakainen’s Children’s Books Lastenkirja and Satukirja

This article examines the process of the foregrounding of language in literary nonsense. The research subjects are two children’s short story collections by the well-known contemporary Finnish author Kari Hotakainen: Lastenkirja (1990) and Satukirja (2004). I ask how literary language can turn to observe its position in the world, what kind of verbal devices the two collections use to reject the reader’s attempt at meaningful interpretation, and how the collections can be seen to belong to the genre of nonsense literature.

In Hotakainen’s children’s books, language is constantly at the foreground of the text. This foregrounding forces the reader to focus on thinking about the language as a system, rather than on concentrating on the meaning of the text. Here, the foregrounding of the text is determined to be a form of metafiction. The article shows that the most important literary strategies that produce the foregrounding of language in Lastenkirja and Satukirja are the incongruous relationship between the syntactic and semantic layers of the language, and the play between literary and metaphoric interpretation.

It is also important to note that in order to foreground the verbal expression of the text, the language must deviate from the conventional methods of use. Paradoxically, these types of transgressions against ordinary language require the implicit underlining of regular usage. Hotakainen’s texts are constantly aware of the ways of making meanings that shake up logic, and it is also this underlining that contributes to the foregrounding of language.