ILONA PIKKANEN
Casting the Ideal Past
ACADEMIC DISSERTATION To be presented, with the permission of
the board of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities of the University of Tampere, for public discussion in the Auditorium Pinni B 1097, Kanslerinrinne 1, Tampere,
on December 14th, 2012, at 12 o’clock.
TAMPEREEN YLIOPISTO
a Narratological Close Reading of Eliel Aspelin-Haapkylä´s History of the Finnish Theatre Company (1906-1910)
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Acta Universitatis Tamperensis 1787 ISBN 978-951-44-8985-3 (nid.) ISSN-L 1455-1616
ISSN 1455-1616
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Tampereen Yliopistopaino Oy – Juvenes Print Tampere 2012
ACADEMIC DISSERTATION University of Tampere
School of Social Sciences and Humanities Finland
Copyright ©2012 Tampere University Press and the author
Table of Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ... 5
1 INTRODUCTION ... 7
A HANDBOOK OF FINNISHNESS AND A TEXTBOOK OF CITIZENSHIP ... 7
OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY ... 13
Research tasks ... 15
How to Read the History: the Method ... 20
The Possibilities and Limits of the Study ... 23
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: NARRATIVE AND NARRATIVITY ... 27
Literary Critical Approach to Narrative ... 29
History-‐writing and Narratology ... 35
ANALYSING THE NARRATIVE OF THE HISTORY OF THE FINNISH THEATRE COMPANY ... 48
The Tempo of the Historical Narrative ... 49
Telling the Story: the Author-‐Historian and the Narrator ... 52
The Spatial World: Stories, Plots and Narratives ... 56
STRUCTURE OF THE STUDY ... 59
2 NINETEENTH CENTURY HISTORICAL CULTURE AND THE HISTORY OF THE FINNISH THEATRE COMPANY ... 62
MONUMENTS FOR THE NATION ... 66
THE PROPORTIONS OF THE NATIONAL PAST ... 73
EARLY ACADEMIC HISTORY-‐WRITING ... 77
DEFINITIONS OF FINNISHNESS AND THE NATIONAL HISTORY-‐WRITING ... 81
THE CLUB WAR AND OTHER KEY PERIODS OF THE NATIONAL PAST ... 88
THE MEANS FOR ’PERFECT AND UPLIFTING IMAGES’ ... 92
3 THE IDEAL STORY-‐LINE AND ITS DIFFICULTIES ... 99
TITLES AND SUBTITLES: FIRST INTERPRETATIONS ... 99
THE STORY-‐LINE AND ITS TURNS ... 102
The Beginning: The Prehistorical Chain of Events ... 104
The Maturation: The Rise and Fall of the Finnish-‐Language Opera ... 110
The High Season or the Disintegrating Theatre ... 117
The Ending: National Theatre and a Double Funeral ... 122
4 THE KEY EPISODES ... 126
THEATRICAL EVENTS AND THEIR IDEAL AUDIENCE ... 128
“A Play Fallen from Heaven” ... 128
The Finnish Opera as a Continuous Performance ... 130
The Enlightened Audience of Ibsen ... 133
The Foreign Admiration ... 134
Shakespeare and the Ideal Audience ... 136
HEROES AND VILLAINS OF THE STORY ... 138
Pombal and the Jesuits and Other Dialogues ... 139
Kaarlo Bergbom and his Followers ... 143
Kaarlo Bergbom in Paris ... 145
The Unfaithful Prima Donna ... 148
Gustaf von Numers in Court ... 151
Minna Canth´s Uncontrollable Passion ... 154
The Savaged and Lacerated Theatre ... 163
The Arrival of Topelius ... 165
TOWARDS A BRIGHT FUTURE ... 175
The “Troublesome Fuss” or the Underdog Theatre ... 176
In the Corridors of the New Premises ... 177
A Tribute to the Bergboms ... 181
HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION AND ITS FICTIONS ... 182
5 THE VOCABULARY OF NATIONALISM ... 188
THE HOME OF THE NATIONAL ART ... 191
THE IRONIC LOOK ... 196
THE RHETORIC OF SACRIFICE ... 198
A PATRIOTIC, ORIGINAL AND NATIONAL THEATRE ... 203
TEXTUAL ACTS FOR COHERENCE AND UNITY ... 205
6 THE SOURCES AND THE VOICE ... 208
A NARRATIVE SATURATED WITH SOURCES ... 212
THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ACT AND THE PAST REPRESENTED ... 216
THE FRINGES OF THE NARRATIVE ... 224
SELECTION AND RESIDUE ... 229
The Theatre Company Looking for Enthusiasm ... 233
The Problem of Lea ... 235
The Place of the Actors in the Theatre History ... 239
THE SELECTED SOURCES OF THE THEATRE HISTORY ... 247
7 THE RECEPTION ... 251
OLD-‐FINNISH RESPONSES ... 252
CRITICAL VOICES: JUHANI AHO AND EINO LEINO ... 256
8 CONCLUSIONS: THE IDEAL OF HISTORY ... 261
APPENDIX 1 ... 277
APPENDIX 2 ... 281
SOURCES AND LITERATURE ... 298
FINNISH SUMMARY ... 316
Acknowledgements
When the work is done, it is a privilege to try to find the words for thanking all those people and institutions who have helped to make it come about.
The financing system of research in Finland is at least for the time still supporting scholars who choose to have slightly winding roads to their degrees.
My PhD project has been supported in its different phases by the Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation, the Finnish Literature Society, the Jalmari Finne Foundation, the Kone foundation (in the research project Kirjoitettu kansakunta: Sukupuoli, historiakirjoittaminen ja kansallinen identiteetti 1800-‐ ja 1900-‐lukujen Suomessa), and the Academy of Finland (in the research project The Finnish Opera Company (1873–1879) from a Microhistorical Perspective: Performance Practices, Multiple Narrations, and Polyphony of Voices). I am very grateful for their support.
Besides scholarships, special people and special places are important for this kind of project.
My supervisor, professor Irma Sulkunen has always included me in her projects, obviously believing in me through all the phases of my project. It has been a pleasure to be one of your students!
My employer, The Finnish Literature Society has generously granted me opportunities to do research and write my dissertation. I want to thank my dear colleagues at the research department of the Society, always ready to discuss theoretical and methodological questions and those minor details we all get stuck in. And especially I want to mention the interdisciplinary research seminar at the Society and its chair, adjunct professor, secretary general Tuomas M.S.
Lehtonen. Thank you Tuomas for teaching me to enjoy an argument!
The research project The Finnish Opera Company (1873–1879) from a Microhistorical Perspective: Performance Practices, Multiple Narrations, and Polyphony of Voices funded by the Academy of Finland has played a crucial role in the last phases of my dissertation. I want to thank the leader of the project, professor Anne Sivuoja and my colleagues Pentti Paavolainen and Ulla Broman-‐
Kananen for all the exciting discussions, comments on my manuscript and especially for letting me concentrate solely on writing during the last year.
In addition, I have had the pleasure to work with bright scholars from different universities in Finland and in Estonia, organizing seminars, workshops and conferences together. All those occasions have provided me with new insights. I also want to express my gratitude to professors Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz for inviting me to contribute to Writing the Nation series and actually pointing me towards the historiographical narratology. My preliminary examinators professors Vera Nünning and Hannu Salmi did an excellent job and provided me with valuable feedback; the suggestions on my vocabulary on narratology by Vera Nünning definitely changed my manuscript for the better.
And in the final phase Päivi Koikkalainen, M.A. and Peter Budzul, B.Ed. were extremely efficient and careful in correcting my language and reading my work with their fresh eyes. All the remaining mistakes are mine.
And last but not least there are six persons whom I would like to mention especially. My parents, Auli and Markku Pikkanen: thank you for all the support, all the grandparenting and all the cleaned windows! My brother Antti Pikkanen, with whom I shared my home during the last, intense, absent-‐minded writing months: you saved many late evening mozzarella salads by arriving home with the missing ingredients (that is, mozzarella and basilikum). My spouse Lars Boje Mortensen: thank you for all the wise talks and happy laughs! I cherish them.
And my lovely sons Pyry and Otso: thank you for simply being there with all your homework, legos and bedtime stories!
1 INTRODUCTION
”Swings and roundabouts: what is gained in coherence may be partly lost in the perceived correspondence to the period; what is lost in coherence may be gained in iconic fidelity. What priorities is one to set?”1
A Handbook of Finnishness and a Textbook of Citizenship
In 1784 Friedrich Schiller declared, “If we would see the day when we have a national theatre, then we would become a nation.”2 From the eighteenth century onwards national borders were being drawn by military means, but also by searching for national primeval pasts with the aid of linguistic theories, myths about the great descent, folk poetry and folktales, historical novels, historical source collections and history-‐writing all around Europe. They were also staged in national theatres, both in the countries with established vernacular high cultures (such as England, France, Spain) and in the new-‐born nations of the Central, Northern and Eastern Europe of the post-‐Napoleonic era. Theatre was one of the central means both in the creation of national literature and in the efficient distribution of the ideas of national cohesion and images of common descent and national characteristics.3
Following the international examples the nationalists of Finland, a Grand Duchy within the Russian Empire, started to discuss the need to establish a
1 Rigney 2001, 87.
2 Quoted in Leerssen 2006, 96.
3 See for example Wilmer 2001, 16–17, 25–27.
Finnish-‐language theatre in the first decades of the nineteenth century. After decades of discussing and writing about the idea and organising an occasional Finnish-‐language societal theatre event, The Finnish Theatre Company was established in 1872.4 In 1902 it was renamed the National Theatre of Finland.
The massive, four-‐volume history written about the first 30 years of its existence, published between 1906 and 1910, was one of the first big cultural-‐historical publication projects in the twentieth century Finland.
The reception declared that Professor Eliel Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s5 (1847–
1917) History of the Finnish Theatre Company I–IV (1906–1910) was a great cultural deed, “a handbook of Finnishness and a textbook of citizenship”.6 Aspelin-‐Haapkylä was the professor of Modern Literature and Aesthetics at the Imperial Alexander University of Helsinki and a central figure in the most important cultural institutions and societies defining the Finnish nation in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries (the vice president of the Finnish Literature Society, a member of the Board of the Finnish Theatre Company and later of the Finnish National Theatre, and vice president of the National Board of Antiquities, to name a few).7 He was also a diligent writer producing biographies and articles about literature, theatre and other arts. Eliel Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s Theatre History continues to have an established place as the main source and a reference book for Finnish theatre scholars and historians dealing with the theatrical life of the nineteenth century.8 However, in spite of his influence on the culture of history-‐writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Aspelin-‐Haapkylä, as so many other non-‐professional historians, does not figure in historiographical surveys.9
This study stems from the interest in the role of vernacular theatres in the creation of national cultures, a multifaceted phenomenon that was at the same time strongly nationalistic and transnational, especially when it came to the
4 Seppälä 2010b, 25, 30.
5 Aspelin until 1906, when he took the double form Aspelin-‐Haapkylä. I am using the double name all through the present study.
6 Maila Talvio, Uusi Suometar 19.12.1909 (no 294).
7 Riikonen 2005, 106–107; Saarenheimo 2001; Selkokari 2008, 48, 89–101.
8 According to Pirkko Koski, Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s Theatre History dominated the theatre research at the beginning of the twentieth century. Koski 2000, 383, 386. I would claim that it seems to be difficult to write about the Finnish-‐language theatre in the nineteenth century without relying on his representation even today.
9 Klinge 2010, 7, 275-‐276.
repertoire but also touring singers, actors and directors. It was both elitist and popular gathering different social groups within the same space, following the same performances. It had both political goals, when it was promoting a single language in the situation of competing linguistic strategies, and cultural aims, when its existence was used to create a national literary canon.
However, when dealing with the Finnish-‐language theatre there is no way around Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s massive, paradigmatic representation of it. After Aspelin-‐Haapkylä there have been separate articles written about different aspects of the Finnish theatre history in the nineteenth century and few monographs approaching the subject matter thematically, discussing for example actresses of the Finnish Theatre Company or workers´ theatres.10 The most current survey (2010) charts theatre and drama in Finland from the eighteenth century until the present. It breaks the Finnish-‐nationalist paradigm by placing The Finnish Theatre Company among the many theatre companies performing in Finland in the nineteenth century, but continuously uses Aspelin-‐
Haapkylä´s Theatre History as one of the main sources.11 In other words, it is not easy to replace Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s monograph as the interpretation of the nineteenth century Finnish-‐language theatre.12
10 One of the early studies is Helmi Krohn´s biography of Emilie Bergbom Emilie Bergbom: Elämä ja työ, telling the story of the Finnish Theatre Company from the point of view of one of the directors – strictly following Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s interpretation: Krohn 1917. For more recent studies, see for example Hanna Suutela´s article An Instrument for Changing Nationalists Strategies: The Finnish Theatre Company, 1872–1883 (2001) and her monograph about the actresses of the theatre, Impyet. Näyttelijättäret Suomalaisen Teatterin palveluksessa (2005) and S. E. Wilmer´s comparative article German Romanticism and its Influence on Finnish and Irish Theatre (2001). Timo Tiusanen´s study about the development of the Finnish-‐language theatre from the ‘time of folk poetry’ to the beginning of the twentieth century Teatterimme hahmottuu:
näyttämötaiteemme kehitystie kansanrunoudesta itsenäisyyden ajan alkuun is very much influenced by Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s Theatre History and its national paradigm: Tiusanen 1969.
Elina Pietilä has been studying the Finnish amateur theatre and the international roots of its repertoire: Pietilä 2003, and Mikko-‐Olavi Seppälä the workers´ theatre in Finland in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries: Seppälä 2007 and 2010a. Pentti Paavolainen has edited together with Aino Kukkonen an amply illustrated general overview of the theatre history in Finland, Näyttämöllä. Teatterihistoriaa Suomesta. The book covers different forms of theatre from prehistorical times to the twenty first century: Paavolainen 2005. Pentti Paavolainen´s biography of Kaarlo Bergbom, the director of the Finnish Theatre Company 1872–1905, is currently in preparation. In addition, Ilona Pikkanen has written a comparative article focusing on the writing of theatre histories and their role in the nation-‐building Theatre Histories and the Construction of National Identity: The Cases of Norway and Finland (2010).
11 Suomen teatteri ja draama. Eds. Mikko-‐Olavi Seppälä&Katri Tanskanen. Like, Helsinki 2010.
12 Many scholars have first pointed out the need to revise his interpretations and then used his history as the central source for the subject matter. See for example Suutela 2001a, 72–73.
Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s Theatre History is a good example of nationalistic history-‐writing and as such perhaps of interest outside the disciplinary confines of the theatre studies or the national borders of Finland. Nationalism, its birth conditions and phases and the differences between different nationalisms, both in Europe and in other parts of the world, have been fervently discussed ever since the 1980´s.13 An important part of the debate is the question of whether nationalism is solely a modern phenomenon or if it has premodern roots.14 In a recent volume Nationalizing the Past. Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz, after publishing a series of comparative studies on nationalism15, take ‘nationalism’ at its face value, and focus instead on national history-‐writing and its mechanisms mapping different qualities and
13 Elie Kedour´s Nationalism was published already in 1960; however, at the beginning of the 1980´s there was a surge of studies on the subject, for example John Armstrong´s Nations Before Nationalism (1982), John Breuilly´s Nationalism and the state (1982), Ernst Gellner´s Nations and Nationalism (1983), Benedict Anderson´s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Eric Hobsbawm´s &Terence Ranger´s (ed.): The Invention of Tradition (1983), Miroslav Hroch´s Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (1985) and Anthony D. Smith´s The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986). See Pakkasvirta and Saukkonen 2004, passim. The volume of the metadiscussion about the different positions these and other historians writing about nationalism have taken tells both about the amount of research and the wide interest in nationalism: the abovementioned and subsequent scholars have been divided into different groups according to their explanations of the mechanisms of nationalism and its age: they have been labeled for example as primordialists, modernists and ethno-‐symbolists; essentialists and constructionists; structuralists, functionalists and
instrumentalists; those speaking for system integration theories and those speaking for socio-‐
cultural integration theories. For a good general introduction, see Pakkasvirta and Saukkonen 2004, 14–25; see also Ichijo and Uzelac 2005, 9–13.
14 There is an extensive discussion about the origins of the national sentiment and nationalism before the nineteenth century, part of which is the question of the relationship between language, literature and national culture. The special character of the Finnish-‐speaking areas of the Swedish Kingdom was sometimes emphasised in the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. However, it has been pointed out that this kind of territorial or even national
particularism, although indicating an understanding of a special character of an area, should be separated from nationalism aiming at establishing an independent national unit within defined borders. Consequently, it all depends on the definition of the term nationalism. For example Jussi Pakkasvirta and Pasi Saukkonen write that different historical situations have created different kinds of nationalisms, and thus it is not necessarily an outcome of the development of capitalism and the modern nation-‐state apparatus, whereas Ichijo and Uzelac emphasize nationalism as a modern phenomenon which has accompanied, among other things, the processes of
industrialisation, the spread of capitalism and the establishment of a modern state. Pakkasvirta and Saukkonen 2004, 9; Ichijo and Uzelac 2005, 2; about the difference between territorial and national particularism and nationalism in the Finnish context see Engman 2009, 26–29 and Pulkkinen 1999, 122.
15 Writing the Nation series, general editors Stefan Berger, Christoph Conrad and Guy P. Marchal.
The most important volumes for the present study have been The Contested Nation. Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories. Eds. Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (2008) and Nationalizing the Past. Historians as Nation Builders in Modern Europe. Eds. Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (2010).
characteristics of national historiography across Europe with a comparative method. They emphasize that national histories have been prominent in a variety of political systems – liberal democracies, fascist dictatorships and communist regimes – and thus they have decisively structured discourses about Europe.16
According to the abovementioned study, national histories are characterized by a strong presentist tendency: in them, the societal and political frameworks condition the framing of the history. This presentism often finds its expression in a particular teleology that culminates and ends either in the present or in the future and goes back to the mists of time to seek the ‘origins’ of
‘their’ nations. Hence national histories are rarely open-‐ended. The beginnings and the endings of national histories determine the narrative construction of the middle.17 In the language of the dissertation at hand this means that the national historiography is often a genre of tightly woven narratives.
In national history-‐writing the national authenticity can be found either in the continuous histories since time immemorial or in the constant disruptions (immigrations, invasions, revolts). National histories are also usually, implicitly or explicitly, defining and dealing with “the Other”: religion, ethnicity, race or class. They are also narrative enactments of heroism and contain seemingly contradictory characteristics: in them mythologization and demythologization are closely related.18 All in all, Berger and Lorenz emphasize the remarkable complexity, multi-‐layeredness and continuity of ’writing the nation’, an activity to which Eliel Aspelin-‐Haapkylä also decisively, in the Finnish framework, contributed.
When it comes to ‘writing the nation’ by writing about theatres there are also similarities across national borders. The European dramatic scene was markedly homogeneous in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.19 However, according to the theatre historian S. E. Wilmer, the focus of the theatre historians looking at the vernacular theatres established back then has been to emphasize their national particularity, their ‘nationness’, which means, for
16 Berger and Lorenz 2010, 25.
17 Berge and Lorenz 2010, 11–12.
18 Berger and Lorenz 2010, 12–14.
19 Senelick 1991, 2–4.
example, concentrating on the domestic repertoire (written in the national language, depicting national themes) and ignoring the transnational character of it.20
Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s Theatre History is voluminous enough to act as a thought-‐provoking tool for discussing the question of ‘writing the nation’, and its different narrative methods at the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition, Professor Adolf V. Streng noted in his review of The History of the Finnish Theatre Company in The Historical Periodical as early as 1912 that no subsequent study could replace Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s Theatre History and that from then on it would be impossible to write about the Finnish-‐language theatre without leaning on it.21 Or, as a modern scholar would put it: it is impossible to study the Finnish-‐language theatre without first analysing Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s representation of it.
This study sets to close read and examine Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s representation of the Finnish-‐language theatre in the nineteenth century. It will ask what Aspelin-‐Haapkylä decided to tell his readers about the theatre, how he chose to do that, and what position the Theatre History had in the wider field of national history writing. In other words, through a close reading of a major, official historical narrative it will contribute both to the history of history-‐
writing in Finland and to the understanding of the nationalistic discourse around the turn of the century. The concepts and methods offered by narrative analysis and, to be more precise, by historiographical narratology have provided the best tools to do this kind of close reading. I will now proceed by further elaborating the research tasks and the method, and then by discussing first the conceptual framework of the study and after that the main concepts used in it.
20 When one looks at the representations of the programmes in general it is clear that the importation of plays from other countries (in the form of adaptations or translations or in the original language) is often excluded from theatre histories even though foreign plays may have outnumbered domestic plays. Wilmer 2004, 19.
21 Adolf V. Streng: Suomalaisen teatterin historia. Historiallinen Aikakauskirja, no. 1, 1912, 37–38.
Objectives of the Study
Eliel Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s History of the Finnish Theatre Company is an exceptional piece of history-‐writing in many ways. Professor Aspelin-‐Haapkylä published the first volume four years after the Finnish National Theatre started to perform in the grand building constructed for it in the heart of Helsinki in 1902. The Finnish-‐language theatre (The Finnish Theatre Company as it was known) had officially existed from 1872 onwards. In other words, the 4-‐volume history with its almost 1600 pages depicts a period of a little over 30 years, which means that the historian dedicates on average over 50 pages for each season. It is a detailed representation of the life of the theatre on a daily basis and its archival character makes it a very persuasive representation, one of the reasons for its popularity as a source book. It is a written monument and a monumentalization of the recent national past.
The main question of the present study is how the Finnish nation was written at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the midst of political, social and cultural changes, by writing about the recent history of the Finnish-‐language theatre. Formulating the question accordingly points to a textualist approach, which sees language not only as an object of contemplation and communication but also as an instrument of action and power.22 Epistemologically this means that historiography is seen as a storied form of knowledge, or, to borrow a recent formulation by Kalle Pihlainen, “(h)istory´s importance for us in cognitive terms is not in -‐-‐-‐ details but in the form, the moral, the story, and the particular take on the world that that particular story with its particular ideological bent produces.”23 Accordingly, history-‐writing is understood as an intertextual field of competing interpretations. What historians do is to compare their representations with each other, because it is impossible to compare them directly with the actual past that is beyond their reach as such, which also means that historical insight is born in the space between rival narrative
22 Bourdieu 1991, 37.
23 Pihlainen 2012, 328.
interpretations.24 Pieces of historical scholarship are written more in the context of this intertextual field of historical representations and the broader historical culture than in relation to the past itself.
In this approach the traditional theoretical dilemma for the historians, that is the relationship of the past and the sources (How much we can really know about the past?), is set aside. It is replaced by questions addressing the relationship of historical scholarship and history-‐writing. How do we actually do history and why the results look as they do? In other words, my study is set in the theoretical field of inquiry interested in the questions of historical discourses and the intertextual field of history-‐writing within which these discourses are formed.
The emphasis on the culture of history-‐writing brings the questions of the textual and literary means of representing the past to the fore. In this approach the main question of historiography is not only to describe in detail the interpretations of a given phenomenon and the ideologies informing those interpretations, but also to concentrate on the literary and narrative means through which those interpretations are established, and the real events in the past are symbolically reconstituted and invested with a particular significance for the contemporary public.25
The claim that historical research is to a large degree a textual enterprise should not be surprising anymore; ever since the so-‐called linguistic turn and especially the seminal writings of Hayden White, Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, Lionel Gossman and Paul Ricoeur in the 1970´s and the 1980´s and the subsequent discussions on narrativity26 it has been accepted by most historians that historical writings are not only documentary sources of information but also
‘verbal artifacts’ and may be legitimately studied as such.27 However, in spite of
24 Gossman, 1990, 293; Munslow 2007, 17. Frank Ankersmit has ventured to claim that if we have only one narrative interpretation of a historical topic, we have no interpretation at all. Ankersmit 1994, 38, 41 and 2001, 14–15; see also Ankersmit 2001, 83 and Bann 1984, 34.
25 Rigney 1990, xii.
26 See for example Ankersmit 1995, passim.
27 Rigney 1990, xi. Philosophical views of the place and significance of narrative in historical inquiry were addressed already in the mid-‐1960´s by the almost simultaneous appearance of books by W.B. Gallie (Philosophy and the Historical Understanding, 1964) and Morton White (Foundations of Historical Knowledge, 1965). Gallie and White first called the attention of
analytical philosophers of history to the importance of the topic. See Dray 1989, 131 and footnote 1 on the same page.
the volume of the metahistorical debate ever since the early 1980´s, and the self-‐
reflexivity of historians in regard to their research processes brought about by the diverse theoretical turns of the late twentieth century, there is a tendency to suppose the homogeneity of all historical writing and to ignore the sheer variety of discursive forms adopted by historians, even within the same work.28 Furthermore, there are many historians who dislike concepts such as ’plot’ or
’story’, especially when it comes to their own writing. For them ‘narrative’ is an ahistorical means of delivering knowledge about the past and thus there is no reason to investigate it especially; historiography provides us with the security of the omniscient and impersonal ’news from nowhere’ narration, that is, a direct connection to the national past.29
Research tasks
The present study sets to examine narrative enactments of national pasts by taking one piece of history-‐writing, namely Professor Eliel Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s History of the Finnish Theatre Company (I–IV) as its case study approached through a close reading of its narrative and rhetorical devices. The emphasis is on the history-‐writing, and especially on its national variant; the subject-‐matter of Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s study, the Finnish-‐language theatre in the nineteenth century, is a side-‐track, although an important one. The History of the Finnish Theatre Company is not a poor choice for this kind of close reading, since the relationship between nationalism and the stage is an intriguing question.
However, any piece of historical scholarship could be approached through the method adopted in this study.
According to my definition above, the main task of the present study is to find out how the Finnish nation was written at the beginning of the twentieth century by writing about the Finnish-‐language theatre in the nineteenth century.
The task needs to be both elaborated and broken down into smaller units: I am
28 Rigney 1995, 144.
29 Munslow 2007, 44; Pihlainen 2012, 323, 327; Rigney 2001, 66; Rüsen 1990, 190; for the still agonizing nature of this discussion, see for example Jorma Kalela´s article Miksi ei pidä ajatella, että historiantutkija tuottaa kertomuksia? (Why we should not think that a historian produces narratives/stories?). Kalela 2009, 294–313.
asking what The History of the Finnish Theatre Company can tell us about the culture of historical writing in the Grand Duchy of Finland at the beginning of the twentieth century. An even further and a more general definition: I am asking how a close reading like this can help us to understand the mechanisms of national history-‐writing. In other words, the text – The History of the Finnish Theatre Company – is in the centre of the study, and it will be approached as a textual universe within its own confines by conducting a close reading on several levels. However, to make it a historical inquiry, and to ask and answer questions that have a meaning beyond the mere text, it must also constantly be placed in the framework of the culture of historical writing in the Grand Duchy of Finland in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It is not only a question of what scholars study, but also what kind of representations they construct about the past. Consequently the intertextual field of historical writing around the text will be explored.
Through a thorough close reading the surface features and the general characteristic of the narrative (such as the plot structure) and its smaller units (such as words and wordings) can be discussed. I will begin by approaching the Theatre History as a concrete object, a platform carrying the story the historian wants to convey by discussing its physical proportions. After this the actual narrative of the History will be analysed. The analysis starts with a question of the overall plot structure: how the narrator30 takes the narrative forward, what are the turning points and milestones he wants the reader to pay attention to, and how this attention is drawn on these key places. This discussion will be elaborated by exploring the more implicit key episodes in the History: those events, episodes and characters in the narrative that are more vividly and intensely described than their surroundings. I will ask what is the role of these key episodes in the framework of the whole story-‐line, what kind of story of the Finnish-‐language theatre they convey and what kind of rhetorical and narrative methods the narrator used to represent them convincingly and to persuade the readers of his interpretations of them, and consequently of the whole theatre company. I am also interested in the concrete wordings, metaphors and labels
30 ’Narrator’ is a concept developed by literary scholars to denote an agent that tells or transmits the story. Neumann and Nünning 2008, 30. For a more detailed discussion of the term and the reasons to use it in the analysis of scholarly history-‐writing, see pp. 52–56 in the present study.
attached to events and episodes depicted in the Theatre History. This analysis will result in sketching the ‘vocabulary of nationalism’ the narrator used to furnish and maintain the discursive world he created.
Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s Theatre History seems to occupy a position between popular and academic history-‐writing: in its reception it was defined as a didactic device every citizen should become familiar with and there are only a few footnotes pointing to the sources. On the other hand, there is a source reference apparatus, although of a peculiar kind, and Aspelin-‐Haapkylä discusses his aims in scholarly terms reflecting the ideals of the scholarly community.
Consequently in the present study the History is placed in the tradition of scholarly history-‐writing by examining those manifestations of scholarly conventions, for example the source-‐reference style adopted in it. My hypothesis is that the explicit deviations from the scholarly rules are a sign of older layers of the culture of history-‐writing still operative and significant, and do not mean that the Theatre History should be defined first and foremost as a popular history.
In other words, besides close reading the text, it is also placed in the wide framework of the culture of historical writing. This is crucial for understanding the political and intellectual background and the narrative methods of the History, but it will also contribute to our understanding of that culture. I will discuss the Theatre History in the landscape of the nineteenth century historical scholarship by presenting definitions of ‘national history-‐writing’ in Finland, and by asking how the Theatre History fitted in or answered those definitions. This means also addressing the (perhaps for the time being unsolvable) question of the typicality or exceptionality of Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s Theatre History.
Discussing the source basis of the Theatre History and approaching the narrative as a fluctuation between source quotations and the narrator´s efforts of bringing the story forward gives me also a chance to consider the authorial position Aspelin-‐Haapkylä takes in regard to his Theatre History and hence in regard to the past – what kind of narrator do we find in the History and consequently what kind of powers he is provided with – and then to return this set of questions back to the culture of history-‐writing of the Finnish-‐language nationalists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Was the past something
that needed to be firmly controlled and guarded or was it a looser area of open endings and negotiations?
In this connection the question of voice will be raised too. I will ask who is allowed a voice in this kind of national narrative, especially at the moment of a rapid cultural and political change. Indeed, one of the questions that runs through the whole analysis is who is or who are the active subject(s) – the protagonist(s) – in Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s story. I am approaching this question by analysing, for example, how the narrator deals with the inner dynamics of the theatre and how he discusses the playwrights and the audience.
Analysing the source basis of the Theatre History has both narrative and ideological levels. A narrative level, since I am looking for binary oppositions31 between different characters and situations in the story arguably used to create the necessary narrative tensions in order to make his History a convincing and interesting representation, and an ideological level, since it has all to do with the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion: what has been taken in and left out of Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s story and thus of the grand narration of Finnishness.
In all these discussions the actual Finnish-‐language theatre in the nineteenth century is approached too. As stated above, my aim is not to write a parallel story of that theatre, but our picture of it will naturally become more varied when Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s Theatre History is set against the sources he used.
Some of the wordings above have already hinted at the main hypotheses of my study: narrative and rhetorical means are used to ‘maintain’ a story and to
‘persuade’ the reader. In other words, I understand a piece of history-‐writing as a textual world of its own, the success of which depends on how well it maintains its inner integrity. The narrative devices used in the Theatre History are all meant to serve that purpose. However, they also have, as already mentioned, a communicative purpose: they are meant to persuade the reader that the piece of historical scholarship in question represents an accurate and a meaningful
31 Stephen Bann has been discussing the French historian Jules Michelet´s way of making the readers conscious of historiographical space, and especially the difference between the past and the present by stating or implying a series of polarities – such as modern/medieval,
rational/irrational. Bann 1984, 50–51. Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s use of polarities is connected to the depiction of social and political dynamics in his narrative.
interpretation of the past.32 Thus the textual world also opens up and spills over its limits. Studying the reception of the Theatre History tells how successful Aspelin-‐Haapkylä was in achieving his goals, and how those goals were defined and redefined by his immediate surroundings.
Referring to the maintenance and persuasion also points to the understanding of any piece of history-‐writing as an end result of a constant struggle between a discursive representation of the past and the past reality, which the historian seizes both at understanding and controlling by selecting parts of it and synthesizing them into a coherent narrative.33 I will address the position of the variant of history-‐writing – the national history – Aspelin-‐
Haapkylä´s Theatre History stands for in regard to this struggle in the Finnish context.
Yet another hypothesis is that different literary genres dealing with the past were collaborating closely when the nation was in the process of being defined by, among other things, writing about its past. The nineteenth century culture of historical writing consisted of many literary genres, both factual and fictional, which is easily forgotten by scholars focusing only on scholarly history-‐
writing or only on fictional texts. This intertextual field of historical writing contributed crucially not only to the content but also to the form of Aspelin-‐
Haapkylä´s Theatre History. To address this question links between historical scholarship and historical novel and drama in the late nineteenth century Finland and their specific, sometimes shared thematic interests will be discussed. The theme is also addressed by close reading Aspelin-‐Haapkylä´s Theatre History: as mentioned above, special attention is paid to those parts of the History where the representative and referential rules of history-‐writing seem to be broken, which again leads to the questions of the borderlines between fictive and non-‐fictive writing, and thus the mechanisms of the culture of history-‐writing and historical consciousness at the beginning of the twentieth century.
32 In this sense the footnotes and other means of making references to sources should be understood both as scholarly conventions anchoring the representation to the sources used and as persuasive narrative means. They tell a parallel story of the scholarly effort and erudition. See Grafton 1997, passim. and my discussion about the source basis of the History in Chapter 6.
33 Rigney 2001, 3, 22–25, 85, 100.
