Fictive personae

Closely related to the “fictive” narratives discussed in the previous section are performances of “fictive” personae. Although there are only a handful of such examples in the data, their analysis interestingly illuminates the range of possible textual patterns as well as the very nature of self-presentation in online dating advertisements – and more generally too. Why and how, for instance, is some performance interpretable as “fictive” and some others not?

As discussed previously (and see also chapter 8), linguistic symbols as virtual models of other semiotic modes have an inherent “fictionality” to them. That is, it is a complex matter of interpretation and often a matter of degree, when, for example, the mapping of a symbol to perceivable human behaviors stops being “truthful” or starts being “metaphoric.” In fact, as will be seen in chapter 7, some interactants think that all language in online dating

advertisements is “embellished” and “unreliable” and should not, therefore, be taken at face value. That is, representations embedded in online dating advertisements require a metaphoric reading, a mapping from one symbolic frame to another. Why, then, is the promotional persona itself not a “fictive”

mode of personhood? The difference between “fictive” and “non-fictive”

personae will become more readily understandable in terms of residential consequences and accountability.

In the following two examples of this section, the writers inhabit a more or less independently individuable and recognizable person-like entity. The fairy tale example in the previous section already included a fictive persona superimposed upon the other personae of the narrator. Such fictive personae are, however, possible in non-narrative contexts as well, as the following two examples illustrate. In example (4.30), the writer likens himself to a bear-like figure:

(4.30) nyt olis hakusessa tälle nallulle oma kulta. tää nallu on perusluonteeltaan kiltti ja huolehtivainen enkä turhasta mutise mutta osaan kyllä myös [sanoa?] suoraan jos tunnen tulleeni kohdelluksi huonosti. – – oon kokopäivä työssä täällä raumalla.

harrastuksiin kuuluu autojen rakentelu ja prätkä.

(4.30) now there’s a search for a honeybunch for this teddy. this teddy is gentle and caring by basic nature and I don’t grumble unnecessarily but I can also [speak up] if I feel mistreated. – – I work full time here in rauma [a city in Western Finland]. my hobbies include building cars and my motorbike.

He refers to himself as “this teddy” (nallu being a sort of hypocoristic variant of nalle, “teddy bear”) and employs a style of writing and perceiving the world that might be characterized, for instance, as a “childlike” or “naivistic”

view of subjectivity. He describes his personality in terms of pet-like cuteness (“lovable unless provoked into grumpiness”). However, the descriptions of his profession and hobbies do not really require, or even fit in with, a bear persona, and they are also set explicitly set in an actual geographical location.

Whereas the writer of (4.30) only lightly evokes a personified bear-like figure, phasing in and out of it, example (4.31) is a full-blown imitation of a popular cartoon character. Example (4.31), in contrast to the previous one, involves a specific, recognizable character that has a life of its own outside the advertisement. The cartoon character that the writer inhabits is the Cursing Hedgehog (Kiroileva siili), a small hedgehog with a nasty attitude.

Accurate translation and glossing of the character’s speech style is impossible here, but it might be characterized as colloquial and miscellaneously (pseudo)dialectal, and it contains a host of real and invented swear words and profanities:

(4.31) [Title] Kiroileva Siili

¶Hakusessa: kiroileva siili(tär) ¶No niin, simputin samputti, joko alkavat bemaripurjehtijat riittää!? Tulevatko korvista ulos uraohjusten osingot ja alkavatko

niiden ”pitkien, tummien & komeiden” urheilevien sporttiadonisten hugobossit tuntua lähinnä mummolan lannoitteelta, jumpska! ¶Se on kuule menoa, kissavieköön! Aimo annos anarkiaa, sillä saadaan, neiti hyvä, rakkaus roihuamaan ja rääkyviä hunsvotteja kasvatustätien kauhuksi. Voihan tuhannen jampettia ja seitkytäyks mersuntähteä, mankuna ja vinkuna ja tää törkeä ”tottuuren vääristely” suapi riittää. ¶Se on kato se asenne, jota ei viistuhatta tommyhilfigeriä pelasta, eli jos pissiksissä on jotain, niin ne vetää ainakin reilusti alkkarit lipputankoo, niinko janhusen pertsa leirillä ysiysi. – – Hra Siili, bachelor

(4.31) [Title] Cursing Hedgehog

¶Looking for: a cursing hedgehog(ette) [FEM] ¶Well now, gosh dang, have you had enough of sailors with BMWs!? Are the dividends of high-flyers coming out of your ears and are the hugo bosses of the “tall, dark & handsome” sports adonises starting to feel like the fertilizer used at your grandmother’s place, crikey! ¶This is it now, jeepers creepers! A whole bunch of anarchy will, dear Miss, set our love ablaze and produce squalling rascals to terrify educators. Oh thousand popinjays and seventy-one Mercy stars, the groaning and the moaning and this outrageous “distortion of the truth” has to stop already. ¶You see it is the attitude, which can’t be replaced by five thousand tommy hilfigers, so if there’s anything to be said for valley girls, at least they hoist their undies honestly up the flagpole, like pertsa janhunen [male nickname+surname] at camp in ninety-nine. – – Mr. Hedgehog, bachelor

From the standpoint of identity performance, the first thing to notice is that the source domain of the performance is popular youth culture.⁶⁶ The writer, on the other hand, is a middle-aged man who, by showing mastery of the interdiscursively sourced character, can plausibly demonstrate his identification with this particular form of culture. Fictive personae, then, allow the performers to shift the sociocultural origo of the event. Secondly, animating a fictive persona brings in a specific representational mode. The animated representational contents cannot be directly or straightforwardly applied to the biographic individual but need to be mapped onto him through a process of inference (e.g., by translating hedgehog-like qualities into human-like qualities). As for accountability, part of the responsibility for and commitment to the contents one animates is relegated to the imitated character, or at least to some degree detached from the self. The properties of the character that serves as the model for the speech one animates can be appealed to as motivating factors (see also section 5.3 and Haakana &

Visapää 2005: 456–461). That is, the writer’s more specific commitment to the represented contents also becomes a matter of inference.

66 The cartoon was, however, published in the biggest national newspaper and as a popular hardcover collection the year the data was collected (2007). In that sense, it was clearly a mass-mediated cultural phenomenon. Perhaps it is merely the identification with, and the imitation of, a cartoon character that is stereotypically easier to associate with youth rather than middle-aged men.

In (4.31), the voicing of the fictive persona enables a somewhat straightforward commentary of different social types and their habits of self-presentation. Although there is no explicit reference to reading or writing dating advertisements, the questions addressed to the reader in the beginning (“have you had enough of…?”) seem to presume a process of browsing through advertisements on a dating website. It is implied that one will find one polished profile after another, the writers invariably describing themselves as “tall, dark & handsome” high-flyers. The writer presumes that the reader, like the writer himself, has had enough of such advertisements – and sees them for what they really are, a “distortion of the truth.” In other words, the writer paints caricatures of social types (e.g., career-oriented persons who like to show off their wealth) and, more specifically, portrays them as unreliable animators. That is, the writer fosters distrust towards the plausibility of their self-presentations. These discredited personae are then contrasted with the writer’s own persona and an attitude “that cannot be bought.” Interestingly, then, the fictive persona actually becomes a metaphor for the “true” self and the “authenticity” of the writer (as it obviates the need to resort to ordinary “inauthentic” promotional performances). Moreover, the poetic performance of the fictive persona serves as a kind of palpable iconic evidence of the validity of the claim that this writer is indeed different.

The fictive persona in (4.31) is therefore also construable as a strategy of

“authenticity” (see also section 5.2.2 and chapter 7).

One might imagine a continuum ranging from, say, clearly fictive context-specific personae towards imagined alternative or idealized personae towards habitually inhabited everyday personae (which are also habitually projected on the self by others). The degree of “fictiveness” (not to mention

“authenticity”) of any particular persona, however, is always a matter of specific metapragmatic calibration and ontological framing.⁶⁷ In the fictive performances analyzed above, the interactants seem to become accountable for the representativeness of the kinds their performances project on them, but not so much for the particular indices they employ. The writer of (4.31) would probably not be expected to continue speaking like the Cursing Hedgehog on a first date, but he would still be accountable for the characteristics the performance projected on him. (In contrast, the writers of 4.5 and 4.6, for example, might more plausibly be expected to exhibit similar indices of “analytical” or “laid-back” speech styles in subsequent events.) In some sense, then, the “fictiveness” of a persona is a matter of how disposable or alienable (or “instrument-like”) that persona is regarded as, or conversely, how near it comes to that which is considered by self and others a necessary and inalienable part of the person (or “possession-like”). In some cases, such differences have to do with how far a persona is located in a chain of interpretation leading from what is relatively directly perceivable towards

67 There may, of course, be movements along the continuum on biographical or sociohistorical time scales. A fictive persona can, for instance, gradually become a habitual alter ego, etc.

what is highly inferential and symbolic. That is, “fictiveness” is a secondary reflexive layer that needs some primary level it can be mapped to. For instance, perceiving a person in his daily routines would not necessarily entail or require an interpretation of him as a “teddy bear.” A first layer of representational interpretants would probably consist of simple typifications of appearance and conduct. They might then give rise to more complex inferences or metaphoric representational interpretants, in which denotational stereotypes are troped upon by re-interpreting first-order typifications such as “robust” and “grumpy” with the concept of “bear.”

Channelling one’s personhood through a “fictive” figure, then, brings out new symbolic dimensions. It reorganizes and reinterprets those indexical, iconic, and previous symbolic relations that it taps into and makes them experienceable in new ways. That is, it interprets the person from another point of personspacetime or sociocultural maps. It is, then, a creative process of self-invention and, as such, perhaps less susceptible to others’ immediate normative regimentation.⁶⁸

4.4.5 PSEUDONYMS AND REPLICATED PATTERNS OF DISCOURSE