Reframing belonging: affective localism and the early fiction of Reino Rinne

ABSTRACT

The early fiction of a novelist and journalist born in the north of Finland, Reino Rinne (1913–2002), is illustrative of the post-war interest in a redefinition of cultural belonging. The aim of this article is to offer a reading of Rinne’s works that throws light on the way they exemplify a post-war articulation of affective localism. What is especially characteristic of the affective localism produced in Rinne’s early fiction is the deployment of certain narrative elements, realism as an aesthetic regime, tropes of spatial belonging and historical myths that are endowed with affective charge. A comparison between Rinne's first novel Tunturit hymyilevät. Kuvaus Lapista 1900-luvun alkuvuosilta ([1945a]. The Fells are Smiling. Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava), and his collection of short stories Erämaan omia ihmisiä ([1949]. People of the Wilderness. Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Otava), reveals that there was a change in Rinne’s artistic practice. While Rinne’s first novel revolved around a promise of reciprocity and happiness, the collection of short stories shows the dissolution of the optimism that, according to Berlant [(2011). Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press], is at the core of all attachments.

KEYWORDS:

• Belonging
• affectivity
• post-war fiction
• aesthetics and politics
• Reino Rinne
• Lauren Berlant

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Nina Sääskilahti http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7836-8049

Notes

1. On geocriticism as a subfield of literary studies, see, for example, Tally (2014).

2. On Rinne’s ecologically oriented poetry, see Sillanpää (2006).

3. After the war Lapland to a certain extent replaced Karelia as a source of nationally prominent visual imageries (see Häyrynen 2005, 74).

4. On masculine imageries of rootedness as well as the politics of cultural memory, see Korhonen (2015). On autochthony, that is, the appeal to soil in nationalist and indigenous claims of “authentic belonging”, see Geschiere (2009). On the politics of memory and belonging, see, for example, Kleist (2015).

5. On performatively constructed individual and collective identities in regard to nature relations of the Sami, see Valkonen and Valkonen (2014).

6. On the withdrawal to wildernesses as a literary response to war in Finnish fiction, see Lassila (1998), Lehtola (1997) and more generally Blackbourn and Retallack (2007).

7. Lilley (2013) discusses belonging in relation to another aesthetic mode, that of romanticism. See especially his chapter on melancholic sentiments.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Kone Foundation and the Academy of Finland under a grant, SA267159 (FEENIKS).