Sileät ja uurretut

Tilan kuvaukset Henrika Ringbomin romaanissa Martina Dagers längtan

• Kaisa Kurikka Turun yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.75005

Abstract

The Smooth and The Striated – Depictions of Space in Henrika Ringbom’s Novel Martina Dagers längtan

Henrika Ringbom’s novel Martina Dagers längtan (”Martina Dager’s Longing”, 1998) appears as a highly spatial novel, since it lays special attention on depicting spaces varying from streets to buildings, homes and hotels, from cityscape to landscape as perceived by the character-narrator Martina Dager. The novel is situated in the capital of Finland, Helsinki, of the late 90s. Martina is a career-oriented economist, who works as an analyst in the Bank of Finland, but in the course of the novel Martina experiences a metamorphic process, through which she becomes ’something else’.

This article concentrates on the question of spatiality by making use of the geophilosophical concepts of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially the concepts of ‘a smooth space’ and ’a striated space’. I analyze the ways Helsinki and Martina’s tiny room in the stony building of the Bank are perceived as striated spaces. Striated spaces are drawn and riddled with lines of divide and demarcations, that name, measure, appropriate and distribute space according to political designs, history and economical conflict. These capitalist spaces are contrasted in the novel with smooth spaces, such as a tiny opening inside a forest in the outskirts of Helsinki. According to Deleuze and Guattari a smooth space is a space of affect, and it is defined by flows of forces. Martina begins to flee to the forest more and more often. The smooth space of the forest becomes a space of emptying herself from all the constraints of her everyday work, it is a smooth space in contradiction to the striated quality of her office and work environment. There Martina loses all her bodily contours and becomes one with the flows of nature. The shift from the striated spaces into this kind of intense smooth space is made clear through the changes of depiction: the smoothness is depicted in terms of hearing, voices, and by touch whereas the striated spaces are depicted through vision. But the shift is also made clear in typographical terms, in the material textual spacing of words on the printed page. While depicting the smooth space of the forest Martina uses another kind of language when describing striated spaces. The official and neutral quality of her expression turns into a poetic flow of words.
My reading of the novel shows how Ringbom’s novel makes visible such places that are usually, in everyday life, remaining un-visible, or even non-places. I claim that in Ringbom’s novel space is connected to ethical, aesthetic and economic perspectives.