Elokuussa 2006
Once upon a time a journalist asked me: “Are these thoughts your own?” His question made me confused. I didn’t answer: “Of course they are not mine.” But that is what I should have answered. Language and words, thoughts and ideas cannot be personal property. A single individual does not need any language. Ideas are owned by the whole mankind and often they will burst and flourish through many individuals simultaneously. I think that every book has many authors, both living and dead.
The human brain is an example of a so-called Complex Adaptive System (CAS). There are lots of such systems in nature, but we know of none more complex. World literature can also be seen as one CAS. It grows mostly underground, in people's consciousness and subconsciousness. Books are only visible manifestations of this huge mycelium.
We have been learned and accustomed to divide the world literature into many compartments which we call genres. The boundary lines between genres cannot be very distinctive. Even in biology concepts of species are not clear at all. How we can and will define such concepts is a pretty tough philosophical question. There cannot be complete consensus about genres and their boundaries in literature research, just like there cannot be unanimity in biology about species. There are hybrid species in nature like there are hybrid genres in literature.
Do we need to define the mainstream or science fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism, slipstream, new weird, speculative fiction?
By the way I must say that often I would like to ask, where the hell is the mainstream, when all the writers and artists, at least the ones I know (including myself), are thinking that they swim against the mainstream. You could think that the so called mainstream literature is actually a narrow little creek.
One Finnish writer has spoken ironically about persons he called in Finnish “mapittajasielut”. I don«t know a good translation, but he means with it something like “filing spirit” or “compartment souls”. With this concept he wanted to scoff people who love to define and assort things, to put them into different lockers and compartments. But thank god that there are filing spirits, we do need them. Definitely we need definitions and names, this is the purpose of language: to point to differences between the innumerable things and phenomenons in our universe. Now somebody comes and says that there are no such definitions and boundaries in nature just like a video artist once said, that he wants to put moral judgements aside, because there is no moral in nature. This is ridiculous, because judgments and definitions belong to human nature. So it is necessary to classify even if the boundaries between species and genres, between right and wrong, between good and bad would be vague and indefinite and even if every classification system is problematic and uncomplete. The fact that there are twilight zones does not remove extreme differences between night and day.
I am very tired of hearing that a true artist always breaks boundaries. Not at all in my opinion. A true artist can also be a true follower of a long tradition (like icon painting), which has not changed for centuries.
I must say that I hate the implicit motto of postmodernism: Everything goes. It is quite clear that everything does not go.
Though definitions are useful, a writer does not need to bother too much about his or her genre.
When Tainaron, one of my books, was published twenty years ago, a journalist interviewed me on the radio. Her questions were so tough that I had to ponder them a pretty long time. Actually I was silent so many stretched moments that some listeners turned round and round the buttons of their radios. They thought there was a break in the broadcasting. But the hardest question she asked only afterwards, when we already had left the studio. Obviously the question had really occupied her. — Were you serious when you wrote that book? she asked.
Her question has occupied me ever since. Was I serious at all? Are writers and painters and composers or — even worse - "workers in the consciousness industry" serious when they do what they have to do? That distant day I tried to convince the journalist that I definitely was serious, but I noted that she was not satisfied with my answer. Actually, neither was I.
You can make a crime with an accurate plan, pondering beforehand your every action. If you are a skillfull chess player you can see many moves forward. But a work of art is a hazardous game, not like chess. Actually it is like an evolving organism. You must give chances, dreams and visions, which you cannot yourself completely control, play with your work and guide it. If you give your work the freedom to grow up, you will observe self-organizing and emergence just like your work was a living thing. I would not call a child’s play or a work of art a project, but a child plays seriously — and so does an artist. She or he is a serious liar, because inside an untruth there is hiding a truth and sometimes a lie is the only way to uncover it.
Truth is much more than not untrue. It is something quite different from facts. Once upon a time I denied that Tainaron was a fantasy novel. I said that there is hardly any fantasy in it. Many of its events and incidents, which look like fabrications of a lunatic imagination, are actually hard reality. When brought to a human scale, the processes of the insect world look like pure fantasy. However, they unveil something essential about human life and fate.
But the truth of fantasy is not included in facts. It is coiling up from the double helix of untrue and true, from an invisible tribar.
A tribar — what is that? With this concept physicist Roger Penrose points to objects and figures which you can draw but not build. There are false links in tribars. There are contradictory and impossible elements. In many of his works the graphic artist Escher shows tribars.
I think of the tribar as a concept, which describes some mysterious features of human society and literature, too. Tribars appear everywhere in our world and they are so self-evident to us that it is not easy to observe them. Tribars connect fiction and so called reality. They connect the rational and the irrational, the material and the immaterial, the representative and the concrete. Nearly all social constructions are based on tribars. Money, for example, is a tribar, as euros and dollars are digital states which are moving and jumping with our hopes and fears, according to changes in our mindscape.
Every fact is partly an illusion, every material artifact is partly a mental phenomenon, because its origin is in imagination.
A symbol is often the only way to approach truth. Here is the power and astonishing influence of literature.