Valtiomuutoksen satiirinen politisointi Mikko-Pekka Heikkisen romaanissa Terveiset Kutturasta

Kirjoittajat

• Heikki Sirviö

Abstrakti

In Finnish literature, satire is a rare genre. There are few prolific satirists, but it is remarkable that most of them have cultural roots in the northern part of the country. It seems that their different cultural geographical perspective contributes to a radical departure from the values and views held in the dominant seats of knowledge and power in Helsinki. Mikko-Pekka Heikkinen joins this tradition with his novel “Greetings from Kuttura” (2012), which intensifies the tensions between the North and the South of Finland to a civil war. I read the novel as a symbolic act in the context of state transformation, in which the ideology and areal structure of modern welfare state is challenged through competition oriented and centralizing neo-liberal argumentation. In my approach to the politics of literature, I build on the concepts of disagreement, symbolic act, and surplus of meaning. Through the metaphor of war Heikkinen’s novel politicizes the centre-periphery relation between the North and the South of Finland, and symbolically transforms a domestic dispute to an issue of international politics through the theme of separatism and claim to sovereignty.