LiteratureasaNationsEmotionalMemory

LiteratureasaNationsEmotionalMemory

byJriTalvet

Source: Interlitteraria(Interlitteraria),issue:03/1998,pages:122135,onwww.ceeol.com.

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Literature as a Nations Emotional Memory

JRI TALVET

In some of my previous writings I have tried to call attention to the evaluative shift in the interpretation by Yuri Lotman of the fundamental cultural codes he himself has proposed, (cf. Talvet 1994/ 1995, 1997), namely of what he defines in his early work as the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic (or symbolic) code.1 Whereas in 1977 Lotman speaks of culture as collective intellect and collective reason which is identical with collective memory and still reiterates it as late as in 1988 (Lotman 1977, 1988, 1992), in 1984, on the other hand, he launches the notion of the semiosphere (Lotman 1984, 1992) which seems to cover a much wider area than culture. The main obsession in Lotmans late writings was to explain the functioning of irregular, unpredicted, explosive changes in the semiosphere and, even especially those ocurring on the borders and in the peripheries of the semiosphere, i.e., in the domain where the syntagmatic or rational links traditionally fail to function. I suppose this shift of focusing has not only to do with Lotmans individual existential experience, but also with the beginning of the transition of the Eastern block closed semiosphere to the open Western type liberal semiosphere. This process gradually started in the Baltic states the periphery of the Soviet
1

These metaphorized definitions have recently been fruitfully resuscitated and applied, for instance, to literary and philosophical phenomena of the Renaissance (Shakespeare, as related to Montaigne and Machiavelli) and of the Enlightenment and Modernism (the grotesque aspect in Swift and Vonnegut) by the Italian comparatist Giuseppina Restivo. Cf. Restivo 1996, 1997.

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empire in the middle of the 80s. On the other hand, supposedly not only has it to do with the crises of the official Soviet cultural science which was obvious to Lotman and his school more than a decade earlier , but also, and even particularly, with the crises in Western cultural science and philosophy. The latter began to be felt with the ever more outspoken upsurge of postmodern thinking, by way of coincidence, in the middle of the 80s. Sadly, Lotman died at the end of 1993. His late legacy, a meditation about borders, peripheries, explosions, leaps and disruptions in the semiosphere, however, is full of actual meanings for the late years of our millenium. Contrary to what Samuel Huntington has prognosticated, not only have the traditional borders between the Western Christian world and the Eastern civilizations blurred and merged in many aspects, not only has lite culture under the sign of postmodernism merged with a sector of mass culture, but the same phenomenon of blurring is ever more evident in the discourses or narratives that try to illuminate or describe different aspects of the universe and human activity. It is ever more difficult to define the borderline between philosophy and anthropology, philosophy and semiotics, semiotics and anthropology (cf. Gross 1996), or philosophy, semiotics and anthropology, on the one hand, and (comparative) literary research, on the other, while literary research and literature themselves, in the writing of the late Barthes, of Derrida and their followers is identified with the equalizing product of criture. The efforts to establish distinguishing borders like the proposal by Mignolo to define literary science or theory as literaturology (Cceres Snchez 1993: 348) have so far failed. I suppose the introduction of the notion of philosophology would likewise fail. These changes do not mean simply the widening of interdisciplinary studies (where the knowledge of different fields of science is supposed to offer mutual support), but just merging, the increasing crisis of self-identification. Facing the radical changes of our time some, like George Steiner, predict an almost apocalyptic future (Steiner 1996: 1213), others, like Tzvetan Todorov or Umberto Eco, try to calm us,

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assuring us that the main problem is just the lack of education (Todorov 1992: 30) or finding a common language, another Esperanto in which the knowledge of different cultures could be transmitted to the new multiracial Europe of the 21st century (see Ecos declarations at the Congress of the 3rd Millenium in Valencia, El Pas. 24. I 1997, p. 32). Some, like Hans-Georg Gadamer, insist on continuing, whatever the outcome, to penetrate into the other, while for others, like Edward W. Said, this effort would hardly be distinguished from the previous colonialist and imperialist politics of the West. There are only few, like Jrgen Habermas, who in our days would dare to draw a kind of a rational panorama, classifying these attitudes and expectations under spectrums like those of young conservatives (Derrida, Foucault, and their numerous addicts), pre-modernist, rather rationalist and cautious old conservatives (with whom Habermas himself apparently sympathizes) and postmodern or art-for arts sake new conservatives (Habermas 1996: 9192). What has the above said to do with the emotional memory and Estonian literature? I suppose there was only a short leap that separated the late Lotman from reinterpreting his former concept of culture as collective intellect. As he admits in his late work, the semiosphere practically cannot meet the non-semiotic world, as the latter, once it is imagined (from the semiosphere J.T.), becomes also, even though superficially, semiotized (Lotman 1993: 375). In other words, the semiotic world is one with the non-semiotic world, the world of culture is one with the world of non-culture, and the world of intellect is one with the world of non-intellect. The efforts to separate them would be in most cases artificial and simplifying. Constant transitions between these worlds are part of the great cosmic transformation. Therefore, to assert that culture is collective intellect and, at the same time, collective memory, which means, by a simple transposition that collective intellect is collective memory and intellect is memory, and vice versa, is scarcely more exact than to claim that culture is collective creation and creative memory in which emotions, sex, and senses have historically had the same weight as intellect or reason.

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The complicated interrelation between these phenomena are especially obvious in socio-geographical or, in a broader sense, semiospheric border areas like Estonia, along with other Baltic countries. Like in all frontier or peripheric cultures, syntagmatic (or rational) structures here have often failed to function, while texts have been born invisibly to the eye of those that try to impose what they themselves imagine as syntagmatic codes. Let us mention a few examples, both from the past and our finde-sicle. Under the Russian tzarist regime, the use of the Estonian language at Estonian elementary schools was for the first time permitted only in 1905. Until then, Estonian schoolchildren those of the generation of my own grandparents who dared to speak at school in their native tongue were punished and humiliated by Russian authorities. Even though books and regular newspapers began to appear in Estonian much earlier, the normal functioning of ethnic culture was for a long time curbed and suppressed. In these conditions where national literature itself was still in its very initial stage, Estonian oral folksongs were the principal means (or, the invisible text) that sustained the memory of the nation. We do not know exactly where the origins of these songs are, maybe in the late Middle Ages, maybe in the 18th century, but the fact is that there is a huge body of Estonian (as well as Latvian) folksongs that has reached our days, in a great variety of regional subtypes. It is also known that the main authors of this anonymous body of folksongs were peasant women. The songs were predominantly lyrical and emotional in contrast with those of Scandinavian skalds or the male jongleurs, who recited the lineages of their kings or great historic events, which in those times were nearly always mens business. Herder offered some samples of Baltic folksongs in his Volkslieder (1778/79), while in Estonia the systematic collection and publishing of regional folksongs started in the second half of the 19th century. It is evident that until the beginning of the 20th century this oral creativity in the Estonian language was hardly considered by the ruling foreigners as an expression of the conscience or culture of a

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nation in Estonia since the ethnic peasant people were for them just simple folk and never a nation. It is true that under the influence of positive sciences the collection and even the publication of old songs were tolerated by the authorities. However, these were supposed to be exotic material from the past, having mainly historical interest, in the syntagmatic construction of a civilized society by the dominant nations. That ethnic folksongs could become an essential part in the national ethnic awakening of the Estonians, was never expected nor desired. The persistence of the emotional memory as a hidden detonating force as well as an indispensable factor of a dialogue can be proved by other examples. Now, a century later, we are approaching another chronocultural border. The tendency towards a homogenious market type society is equally strong in all postcommunist societies, including Estonia. However, traditional song festivals an intertext reaching us from the times of predominantly oral culture are held almost every year in the Estonian capital Tallinn and other major towns. They bring together thousands of singers, wearing national costumes, from all parts of the country. From the point of view of a thoroughbread postmodernist this could be viewed as an awkward anachronism. The direct intertextuality similar traditions, a century ago, in Germany has disappeared. In the Estonian poetry of the second half of the 20th century there is hardly any poet who would imitate old folksongs meters, and the young ladies in Tallinn and other major towns, even in Estonian villages, follow the same fashion trends as their counterparts in Paris or London. Maybe this paradoxical phenomenon has to do with the peculiar inner stratification of a border culture. First, to survive, it has to be both dialogical and polylogical. As soon as it admits fully one of the dominant centralizing or, in Lotmans terms, syntagmatic structures, it disappears as an individual culture or conscience. On the other hand, as the nations individual cultural development has covered a relatively short lapse of time in the case of the Estonians, scarcely more than a century the borderlines of the cultural intertextuality are concentrated in an extraordinarily limited temporal space.

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This means that different chronocultural borders cross and intertwine to a far greater extent than this could be in the case of dominant cultures of bigger nations. Different and even contradicting chronocultural codes intermingle. Or, to apply existentialist terminology, the predispositions for alienating structures are definitely weaker in a small society than in a big society. The proportion of the emotional memory, in the reaffirmation of an individual conscience, may even seem as exaggerated to those alien to this particular border semiosphere. The word predisposition was stressed, because any border culture or border semiosphere exists in a constant state of selfdefence, being continuously menaced by the imposition of monological, centralizing and syntagmatic structures both from outside and inside. In 1861 Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald, one of the main founders of Estonian national literature, published his epic poem Kalevipoeg. Strongly influenced by Kalevala, of his Finnish colleague Elias Lnnrot, Kreutzwald aspired to give the Estonian people its true national monument, comparable to the ancient epics of bigger and older nations. Scarcely half a century later, in 1912, Kreutzwalds epic was strongly criticized by Friedebert Tuglas, at that time a young symbolist writer who, however, had already travelled in Italy and Scandinavia, had breathed in the modern airs of European naturalism and symbolism and was to become one of the most influencial Estonian literary critics of the 20th century. His main objections to Kreutzwald were that Kalevipoeg, in contrast to Lnnrots Kalevala, was not so much based on authentic folksongs than on the authors own imagination; that Kreutzwalds style was eclectic, scientifically incorrect and that he had tried to create an epic work from basically lyrical material (Tuglas 1959: 124, 126, 127). Despite Tuglas criticism, some later attempts of freudian interpretation of Kalevipoeg and parodic travesties, like that by Enn Vetemaa (1971), the fact remains that Kreutzwald still succeeded in creating an integral myth of a national hero, Kalevipoeg, which has firmly settled in the emotional memory of the Estonians, very much like Goethes Faust in German national memory.

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Tuglas criticism can be viewed as a typical conflict of a chronocultural code (symbolism, mixed with positivist thinking) with the preceding one (romanticism). Tuglas was devoid of an evaluative distance to locate Kalevipoeg in a wider romantic (and even symbolist) context. Such a distance would have reaffirmed Kreutzwalds work as the last great national-heroic epic of European nations. It offers a vigorous symbol of a hero not at all devoid of defects and contradictions who defends his people against foreign invaders and the forces of the evil, is finally punished for his sins (a symbol of a young inexperienced nation falling under tyranny of mightier invaders), but promises in the final scene to return one day and bring liberty to Estonia. The mixture of the epic text with lyrical elements, quite contrary to what Tuglas suggested, is the main source of Kreutzwalds individuality and the main asset of the myth, created by him, in the emotional memory of the nation. In view of the romantic conception of intertextuality, formulated already in the philosophy of Herder, it would be rather ridiculous to blame Kreutzwald for not employing, in the vein of scientific seriousness, the authentic material of the folksongs. The basic connection with the ethnic-poetic tradition is achieved by the rhythm, the metre and abundant alliterative associations. Contrary to what is generally thought in the shadow of Tuglas spiritual authority, I tend to suggest that the greatness of Kreutzwalds genius lies just in not following the example of Kalevala, i.e. not trying to to imitate the medieval poetic code and create a collective hero (based on a variety of folksong cycles), but in a rather loose folkloric intertextuality which supports and never restrains the construction of an individual myth, in the true spirit of late Romantic poetics. By the way, the persistence of Kreutzwalds myth has just gained renewed evidence, as a witty burlesque play Srane soolikas (Such Guts) by a talented young Estonian humourist and playwright, Andrus Kivirhk, has been staged at Prnu Theatre (1997), with the leading figures of the awakening period, Kreutzwald, Koidula, Jakobson and Jannsen, as the main characters. The emotional intertext reaching us from the past preserves its strongly accentuated ambiguity. The provincial surgeon Kreutzwald

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working on Kalevipoeg under the (supposed) tyranny of his wife and receiving a secret visit by his intimate pen-pal, the darkhaired patriotic poetess Koidula, is turned into a caricature and at the same time elevated. The play mingles elements of postmodern camp and ethnic folklore. In the final scene Kreutzwald and Koidula perform a dance on roller skates and, singing, extol liberty. I have referred above to some of the advantages the relative smallness of a semiosphere can provide. On the other hand, the obvius disadvantage is that because of the scarcity of relevant literary criticism, a code can easily be extended beyond its historical (and, thus, relative) borders, at the expense of other codes. It is quite natural that the generation headed by Tuglas began to construct, at the start of the 20th century, a code differing from that of Kreutzwald and the national awakening of the 19th century. However, as soon as the new code became overwhelming and acquired a syntagmatic quality, which was supported by Tuglas own (even officially) central position in the Estonian postwar literature framed by the Soviet marxist theory of realism , it did not work any more for the openness of the national memory, but rather for its ideologically tendentious closure. Besides the myth of Kalevipoeg, another example of how, despite the imposition of centralizing syntagmatic structures, the emotional memory of the nation survives in literature, is the patriotic poetry of Lydia Koidula. Her most famous poems where she exalts the ideas of Estonian national liberty and love of her country are contained in her first mature collection Emaje bik (The Nightingale of Emajgi), published in 1867. She herself became one of the symbols of the national awakening (her writers name Koidula is a derivate of the word koit dawn). During the Soviet postwar period, however, there was some ambiguity over her work. Like Kreutzwalds Kalevipoeg, it was in part accepted by the official ideology (as a symbol of her peoples national liberation from the German landlords). Yet the ethnic patriotism, under the Soviet rule, had its clearcut limits: no hint was allowed at the desire to have more liberty than the Soviet empire itself provided.

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During those years, at all national song festivals, the presentations by choirs of a song based on one of the most famous patriotic poems of Lydia Koidula, Mu isamaa on minu arm! (My Homeland is My Love!) became the point of a semiotic conflict between the emotional memory of the nation and the official syntagmatic structures. Singing it could not be entirely forbidden by the Soviet authorities, but as people at the end of any festival would demand to repeat just this song, there was always a considerable trouble with the final ceremony and the KGB was put on a constant alert. Some of Koidulas best patriotic poems are also an example of how a poetic intertext can be transformed into an original text, capable of supporting the nations memory. In an essay on Koidula, Tuglas is apparently puzzled by the fact that Koidulas real poems are almost unknown by the general public, while a couple of poems, supposedly adaptations from the German, have become the main signs of Koidulas myth, known to every Estonian (Tuglas 1959: 212). Like in the case of Kalevipoeg, the perplexity is once again produced by the positivist yearning of factual authenticity. At the same time world literary history abounds in examples of how intertexts deriving from other semiospheres are recodified into original texts capable of transmitting in their own semiosphere much more powerful messages than the possible prototexts ever could in their semiospheres. This concerns especially the texts that have become part of the emotional memory of a nation. To a far greater extent than the work of Kreutzwald and Koidula, the poetry of Juhan Liiv (18641913) falls out of the main poetic current of his time. Liiv, who later came to be considered as Estonias most purely lyrical poetic genius, spent the final part of his life in the state of mental disorder, in poverty and harrassed by illnesses. However, several of his early lyric poems and the verses written during his short periods of recovery have become firmly rooted in the national memory. Whereas the bulk of the syntagmatic poetic pattern consciously constructed by the immediately following symbolist generation, headed by Tuglas, has faded in time and in the collective memory, some of Liivs short elliptic poems are known by heart by nearly all Estonians.

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Despite their apparent simplicity they transmit an emotion nearly always reflecting some essential features of Estonias history and conscience. In the words of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, this would be the tragic feeling of life of peoples and nations (el sentimiento trgico de la vida). In Estonian, however, the implications are even wider, as the Estonian verb tundma, of what tunne (feeling, sentimiento) is a derivate, does not mean only to feel or sentir, but also to know, conocer. Though Liivs poems, too, transmitted patriotic feelings, Tuglas could not reproach him for romantic simplicity. Yet Liiv was alien in his time. He himself was quite conscious of the difference, as he addressed the official Estonian literary society giving one of his poems the title Dont Ask Poems of Me and rejecting, in the poem Noor-Eestile (To Young Estonia) the homage the new literary circle paid him. One may guess that what made Liiv different was not just an intertextuality from the past. In fact, the latter was extensively present in the work of the early symbolists themselves just because of the inevitable closeness of chronocultural borders in a small cultural space. Liiv introduced rather an intertextuality from the future a new pre-existential code which rejected any syntagmatic mannerism as false and artificial. Not only did Liiv in his life resemble Hlderlin, from a century earlier, but also in the elliptic, i. e. asyntagmatic, way of expression. Below I shall try to transmit a (rather literal) free verse translation of one of Liivs characteristic short poems, Tule, pimedus (Come, Nights Darkness), supposedly from the last part of his life an eloquent example of an unconscious intertext going back to Hlderlins poem Hlfte des Lebens.

132 TALVET Tule, pimedus, vta mind slle. Minu pike ei tunne mind, jnud mulle. Ainust thte sl pole, minul on kole. Varja mu le. Come, nights darkness, take me in your lap. My sun doesnt recognize me, the night is left to me. Theres not a single star, I am in horror. Shadow over me.

Finally, as we come to our present day fin-de-sicle codes in Estonian literature, a curious similarity can be observed with the situation in the 1920s. With the new liberties after Estonias regained independence, a rush of Western philosophical ideas, both from the past and the present, has hurriedly counterbalanced the absence of an open philosophical discourse during the Soviet period. In less than two years in a new philosophical series fundamental works of Russell, Mill, Heidegger, Derrida, Seneca, Aristotle, Unamuno, Camus and others have appeared, while the monthly literary or literary-philosophical magazines Akadeemia, Vikerkaar and Looming compete in holding up a dense philosophical discourse. Estonias own younger philosophical voices can be heard, now continuing the nihilist (or, in Habermas terms, young conservative) line of thinking, now adhering to a more rational position, a kind of a new realism. Indeed, the outward impression would confirm Lotmans theory of a cultural explosion and a subsequent leap to a new quality. Some of the younger philosophically bent critics (most outspokenly, Hasso Krull) have come to speak about the culture of disruption(cf. Krull 1996). Here I would disagree. Any leap, in my opinion, can only become reality because of the continuity of discourse, even though the latter may be a hidden, invisible or suppressed one, represented not so much by syntagmatic (rational, positivist, intellectual, official) structures, as by the emotional memory. I would even argue that the discontinuity of culture usually becomes especially visible due to the invisibility of a section of cultures continuity. Emotion (in the literal meaning, a movement up and

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out), suppressed and, thus, condensed in a detonating state, mobilizes all creative fasculties into a capability of producing an explosion a break-through in the centralizing syntagmatic structures. However, we should not simplify. Literature has a special mission. It has to fulfil the function of philosophy, as the section of cultural discourse which always has been closest to verbally expressed philosophical discourse. At the same time literature can hardly be a purely intellectual discourse. The primary function of its images is to transmit, along with the mental and intellectual values, the integral fulness of reality, including its emotional, sensual, sexual, telluric, psychological, spiritual, etc. aspects. In other words, to transmit and create reality and philosophy as its part not as a mere idea, but in its complicated, sensually graspable bodiness. While the philosophical or, lets say, intellectual memory was at least in part crippled during the Soviet period, the philosophical discourse continued to exist in literature as a kind of emotional memory. It goes without saying that it had to be skilfully hidden in images, allusions, ambivalent grotesque and irony the expressive means that were prevailingly characteristic of Estonian literature (and other branches of art) at least from the beginning of the 1960s. (Cf. on this subject Tootmaa 1997). Liberal philosophical discourse also reached Estonia via translations (e.g. in the 60s Kafkas Der Prozess and short stories, and in 1972 Camus Le mythe de Sisyphe as well as the first book of Borges prose were translated) or was read directly in its original language. The new generation of Estonian writers emerging in the 1960s was fully aware of existentialism, the literature of the absurd, the new theatrical experiences, etc. Although the menacing presence of censorship was always evident, it would be wrong to claim the absence of philosophical discourse itself, as Yuri Lotman started to publish his influential articles on structural semiotics, while continuing to work until his death at the University of Tartu, as early as in the 1970s. Last but not least, the main channel of the plurality of discourses, including those sustained by the emotional memory, as well as the main basis for a border polylogue, never disappeared in Estonia. I mean the Estonian language, which despite all efforts

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of Russification and even during the harshest years of stalinism continued to function at all schools, universities, the major newspapers and magazines of Estonia. Yuri Lotman has used on several occasions the notion of desemiotization. I suppose this is a fundamental process of the semiosis. Under certain historical or political circumstances some strata of reality are forgotten, desemiotized. However, I would like to stress that desemiotization is seldom absolute. Even the zero-sign, of what Lotman, too, has spoken, is full of significance and capable of generating an abundance of new signs. Thus, while the intellectual strata of a nations memory is deafened and blinded, emotional memory of what literature is a primary vehicle lives on, to make both semiosis and dialogue everlasting realities.

References
Cceres Snchez, M. 1993. Kirjanduse uurimine ja selle distsipliinid. Akadeemia, 2 (Tartu). Gross, T. 1996. Mistmisest ja teisest antropoloogias. Akadeemia, 2 (Tartu). Habermas, J. 1996 (1981). Modernsus lpetamata projekt. Akadeemia, 1 (Tartu). Krull, H. 1996. Katkestuse kultuur. Tallinn: Vagabund. Lotman, Y. 1977. Kultura kak kollektivnyi razum i problema iskusstvennogo razuma. Nauchnoi Sovet po kompleks. probl. Kibernetika AN SSSR. Lotman, Y. 1984. O semiosfere. Semiotika, 17. (Acta et Commentationes Universitatis Tartuensis, 641). Lotman, Y. 1988. Klio na rasputie. Nashe nasledie, 5. Lotman, Y. 1992. Izbrannye stati. I. Tallinn: Aleksandra. Lotman, Y. 1993 (1989). Kultura kak subiekt i sama-seme obiekt. Lotman, Y. Izbrannye stati. III. Tallinn: Aleksandra. Restivo, G. 1996. Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Montaigne. Interlitteraria, 1 (Tartu). Restivo, G. 1997. The Grotesque and History in Swift and Vonnegut. Interlitteraria, 2 (Tartu). Steiner, G. 1996. Una apuesta con la muerte. El Pas/Babelia, 1.6.

Literature as a Nations Emotional Memory 135 Talvet, J. 1994/95. Describir la modernidad: Gracin, Ortega, Lotman. Tropelas, 5/6, (Zaragoza); also in 1997. M. Cceres (ed.), En la esfera semitica lotmaniana. Valencia: Ediciones Episteme. Todorov, T. 1992. La aldea y el mundo. El Pas/Babelia, 21.7. Tootmaa, R. 1997. Fixing Anti-Values and Creating Alienated Illusions. Interlitteraria, 2 (Tartu). Tuglas, F. 1959 (1912). Kirjanduslik stiil. Tuglas, F. Teoseid. VII. Tallinn: Eesti Riiklik Kirjastus. Tuglas, F. 1959 (1929). Kne Koidulast. Tuglas, F. Op. cit.