Antipoliittinen politiikanteoria ja poliittisuuden symbolinen rakentuminen Marko Tapion Arktisessa hysteriassa

Kirjoittajat

• Timo Pankakoski

Abstrakti

The article analyses Marko Tapio’s novel Arktinen hysteria (1967–68) as a political text. With Jacques Rancière, I demarcate the politics of literature itself from the ideological views of its author and argue, against earlier interpretations, that Arktinen hysteria is a political book in this sense. The political relevance of literature pertains to its ability to address the nature of the political world and the limits of political community. Tapio’s novel takes an actively anti-political stance, arguing that politics is unnecessary, detrimental, and a form of legalized crime. While ostensibly condemning both proletarian and bourgeois politics in the setting of the Finnish civil war, the book, however, recurrently identifies “politics” with socialist politics – a move reinforced by metaphorical assimilations with disease. Also Tapio’s unpublished notes suggest that the novel makes its metapolitical claim against the necessity of any politics from amidst political quarrel, thus amounting to an eo ipso political work. I identify three further political-theoretical arguments – pertaining to the questions of mass politics and propaganda, order and chaos, and violence and speech, respectively – and show how they are mediated by subtle symbolic interplay on the level of text, particularly through the symbols of cracking dam, Hitler’s photograph, and submachine gun.