In Kaikki naiset näkevät unia, originally entitled Rouva Pyy (Mrs. Pyy) and then Kaksikymmentä lukua rouva Pyyn elämästä (Twenty Chapters of Mrs. Pyy’s Life),162 the decisive moments of Mrs. Pyy’s awakening are depicted episode by episode as the possibilities for her flowering are represented as two alternative paths: digression or lingering. Mrs. Pyy is one of Vartio’s full-grown characters, who keep falling into regressive traps and lose their sense of the crucial distinction between the virtual and the actual. In the representation of Mrs. Pyy’s mental crisis, her inner wound leads to cyclic patterns of regression characteristic of both lingering and digression. Whereas in digressive paths decisions lead to actions that worsen a character’s situation and result in intervals of paralysis, in lingering patterns the character’s situation worsens while she or he remains undecided, unable to decide whether to act or not. What are Mrs. Pyy’s real chances of finding her way after having gotten lost in the forest?
Getting Lost. Digression and the Lingering Paths of Awakening
Already at the beginning of the novel, possibilities for Mrs. Pyy’s develop-ment are staged, as she is seen observing a new neighbor moving in. The portrayal of Mrs. Pyy arranging flowers by the window alludes to her patterns of accidental, unmotivated, and gratuitous acts. While focused on evaluating the neighbor’s taste and furniture, she is depicted performing absent-minded acts: “Maybe it would be better to let [the withered flowers]
be, there seemed to be no new buds in the plant. But she nipped off one branch and saw that she had broken off a branch that did have buds on it. Mrs. Pyy noticed that her fingers had gotten moist; she had crushed the flower’s branch” (K, 6–7).163 The “fateful” pinching off a branch still in bloom depicts Mrs. Pyy’s habitual behavior. In a similar vein, the “dreadful change“ (“hirveä vaihtuminen”) Mrs. Pyy sees in the mirror is caused by the carelessness of the girl in getting lost in the forest: “Had her attention slipped for a moment – and this happened at that time […] and the girl had kept on going without knowing that a betrayal had taken place” (K, 229).164 The girl had chosen the wrong road as if by accident (without a conscious decision being made) and remained unmindful of the fatefulness of her actions – a recurring pattern that seems to have become a vicious circle in Mrs. Pyy’s life.
The different stages of decision making, illustrated in the passage above, demonstrate the complexity of causal interactions employed throughout the entire novel. The absent-minded acts may have unexpected, far-reaching consequences, as patterns of cause and effect are generated randomly and proliferate against all odds. The difficulties of interpreting causal inter-connections in Kaikki naiset näkevät unia derive from two strategies used in narrating Mrs. Pyy’s story. First of all, Mrs. Pyy’s actions are generated by her inability – and consequently, the reader’s inability – to discern causal connections, because of a lack of Mrs. Pyy’s innermost intention to act, the absent cause for her trauma. In narrative fiction, the interpretation of
causal positions is usually determined by the “coming-into-being intent”
of the character. This intent leads to the character’s decision to undertake action and gives the reader information about what is going to happen and why. Information about intent guides the reader’s attention, both to the upcoming action and to the state of instability, which needs to be corrected.
(Kafalenos 2006: 69)
Second, the uncertainty in Mrs. Pyy’s life plot is caused by the manipula-tion of causal interacmanipula-tions generating hypothetical, virtual worlds that exist simultaneously with the textual actual world. Mrs. Pyy is constantly lost in alternative worlds, which challenges the reader’s ability to distinguish between “real” intents and virtual intents expressed by Mrs. Pyy as hypo-theses, lies, fantasies, and other counterfactual accounts. Instead of one chronological sequence, the reader is given alternative sequences with two sets of events: the factual set and its hypothetical other (Dannenberg 2008:
63). Getting lost is caused by Mrs. Pyy’s inclination to misread the functions of her actions, whether by misinterpreting her own intentions or escaping into hypothetical realities, which give her momentary liberation from the feeling of suffering.
The modal semantics of possible world theory involves operators of necessity and possibility that, in Marie-Laure Ryan’s model, include the sub-worlds created by the mental activity of characters. The opposition of the real world and the possible world is established within the plot of the narrative text in a way similar to the way fictional worlds relate to the actual existing world. Alternative worlds are created by the mental acts of the characters, who manipulate possible worlds through mental operations165:
[T]heir actual world is reflected in their knowledge and beliefs, corrected in their wishes, replaced by a new reality in their dreams and hallucinations. Through counterfactual thinking they reflect on how things might have been, through plans and projections they contemplate things that still have a chance to be, and through the act of making up fictional stories they recenter their universe into what is for them a second-order, and for us a third-order, system of reality. (Ryan 1991: 22)
The fictional world-systems involve not only actual, but also faked and pretended worlds. The characters’ private domains are simultaneously authentic and inauthentic constructs, containing “beliefs and mock beliefs, desires and mock desires, true and faked obligations, as well as genuine and pretended intents” (Ryan 1991: 118). In Kaikki naiset näkevät unia, the challenges of reading Mrs. Pyy’s mind stem from the presentation of her private worlds of delusions and faked beliefs, which do not always align with the textual actual world at the center of the work’s modal system.
The narrative path of Mrs. Pyy’s epistemic quest is mainly portrayed through counterfactuals, her speculations about alternative paths to her life. Counterfactuals create links between decisions made in the past and their consequences, which have far-reaching effects on the present situation and evoke feelings of regret or relief. Counterfactuals are created as the characters look back and revive the life paths they once rejected. These
Getting Lost. Digression and the Lingering Paths of Awakening
unactualized counterfactual roads often look greener than the paths actually chosen. (Dannenberg 2008: 71) Coincidences often result in the need for counterfactual “replotting” – speculations by the characters on what might have been without the bad timing and the missed connections. They involve speculations about alternative life paths. The causal connections within counterfactuals are realized as a relation between the antecedent, which refers to a point in the past at which reality is altered and a new hypothetical version of events created, and the consequent, which renders the result of that alteration further down the counterfactual time path.Counterfactual thinking therefore creates cogent causal connections within narrative sequences, but at the same time frustrates the reader’s desire for causal-linear clarity by suggesting more than one possible version of events. (Ibid.: 45, 111) Counterfactuals create links between decisions made in the past and their consequences, which have far-reaching effects on the present situation.
Characters’ thought experiments about “what might have been” generate altered outcomes and alternative life stories. These alternative scenarios produce patterns of diversification and multiplicity that undermine the causal-linear teleology of events. The fork metaphor (embodying the cross-road situations in life) is actualized in counterfactual life plots involving two different stages in a decision-making process. While the first stage portrays a character contemplating two or more unactualized future alternatives (expressed in the idea of decisions as junctions in the road), the second stage of the process describes a situation in which the unactualized path has already become the alternative branch now being contemplated by the character located on the other, actualized trail. (Dannenberg 2008: 1–2, 71) Counterfactuals, or the “disnarrated,”166 pertain to narrative patterns involving unrealized possibilities: “one does not do what one intends,” “one loses what one has,” “one does not obtain what one expects,” or “one is not what one seems to be or could be.” By suggesting alternatives to the written narrative, counterfactuals present nonaction, loss, absence, and different negatives (Mosher 1993: 418).
The plot pattern of female Bildung is evoked as Mrs. Pyy counterfactualizes her lost chances for education and a profession. The recurring theme of this story type, namely, the quest for identity being repressed by marriage, is subverted by Mrs. Pyy’s counterfactuals, which insert a new line of causation into the story and make it difficult to infer the real causes and consequences of her deferred Bildung. While counterfactualizing her life choices, Mrs.
Pyy repeatedly accuses her husband of preventing her from fulfilling her potential. According to Mrs. Pyy, it is her husband who has “cut [her] wings”
(“leikannut […] siivet”) and forced her to “let everything pass her by”
(K, 26)167:
“I certainly have had to pay dearly for this education. If I had known then what I know now, would I have gotten married and had children in such a hurry?
Certainly not. I would have continued my studies and I would have a career now.”
“You should have looked farther ahead and married a rich man. You knew that I had no money.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Mrs. Pyy stared ahead. And the man asked whether she was now thinking about where she would be if she weren’t here.
[…] Nowadays you talk about that all the time and even when you don’t, you walk around looking like you’re always wondering what landed you here. If it’s not too late, turn your life around. (K, 198)168
Mrs. Pyy often represents herself as a victim of circumstances that have nothing to do with the situation she has gotten into. While crying over her lost chances in life, she projects her self-hatred onto the people around her:
“She hated her husband and her mother-in-law, hated her whole life, hated it. Her skin had become old, ahead of time, but it wasn’t her fault, but the fault of those who had forced her to live these years the way she had had to live them.” (K, 123)169 The protagonist’s negative affects, her resentments and obsessions, comprise a private world that conforms to fictional reality only to some extent. In brief moments of self-revelation, however, Mrs. Pyy can see that the tragedy of her life is partly of her own making. In one of these moments, Mrs. Pyy reveals her thoughts to the artist, whom she wishes to know more intimately:
Sometimes I do such precise work that I have no peace if even one match is left on the bottom of the trash bucket […]. And then I let everything go for weeks.
I just sit there like you are doing right now, and wait for someone to come and nudge me into motion. […] and then I hate doing anything again, as if I had a bad conscience because everything I do is useless and done wrong and I should be doing something else, and I just keep waiting until I figure out what I should do and then I don’t do anything anyway. (K, 147–148)170
The passage demonstrates the blend of two strategies that alter causal relations, namely, digression and lingering, which generate alternating periods of passive waiting and hyperactive decision-making in the novel.
These patterns add to the emotional fluctuation typical of Vartio’s self-suffering characters. In the novel of awakening, the disparity between dream and reality serves as a state of imbalance that causes Mrs. Pyy to break out of her passivity and take action, which, however, results in failure and another period of stasis, a frozen condition.
Mrs. Pyy’s inclination to construct alternative life paths generates repetitious patterns of narrative branching, which illustrates the human mind’s tendency to feel regret over what a person didn’t do rather than what she or he did. As mentioned, Mrs. Pyy often resorts to hypothetical, alternative scenarios, which mentally mutate the “traumatic” present in which she finds herself. By counterfactualizing her life choices, she struggles to “undo” the events of the past caused by her rashly made decisions.
Alternative life scenarios are formulated especially at times of personal crisis in reviewing a life’s trajectory. The long-term feelings of loss over the roads not taken are typically triggered by dramatic or exceptional life situations that cause negative or traumatic outcomes. The more abrupt and discontinuous the changes are, the more persistently the human mind tries to explain the departure from normalcy by counterfactualizing alternative, more conventional scenarios. (Dannenberg 2008: 111)
Getting Lost. Digression and the Lingering Paths of Awakening
Two counterfactual emotions, satisfaction and regret, refine the emo-tional story structure of Vartio’s novel.171 These two directions are illustrated in Kaikki naiset näkevät unia with a reference to the title of the novel.
Awakening to reality – pictured as the shared experience of all women – has two directions, for better or for worse: “You are the way women are: they dream, they wake up in the morning, stare with empty eyes and are either disappointed that the dream was not real or thank their lucky stars that what they did in the dream was only a dream” (K, 231).172 The upward counterfactuals stimulate feelings of regret as they construct a better possible world of the actual outcome of events, whereas the downward counterfactuals create an alternative state of affairs that is worse than the actualized state and therefore brings satisfaction and relief. Thought experiments that either improve or worsen reality are both based on the contrasting relationship between a “real” event belonging to a “factual”
world and an alternative version of reality that counters the events of the factual one.(Dannenberg 2008: 112, 119) As stated, the human mind is more inclined to change the course of the actual events to a better direction, to feel regret over the unactualized life paths that now look more promising than the one once chosen.
In Mrs. Pyy’s life story, the downfall plot pattern – the accumulative decision-making situations that repeatedly lead to failure – generate upward counterfactuals, which alternate the outcome of events in a better direction.
Upward counterfactuals juxtapose a desired, positive version with an undesired, negative version, which becomes the actual narrated story in Mrs.
Pyy’s life. Towards the end of the novel, it becomes increasingly clear that Mrs. Pyy will not become what she wanted or expected to be. The alternative worlds she has created for herself result in inaction and loss, emptiness instead of fulfillment. One by one she loses the things she has managed to gain, which underlines not only the inefficiency of her actions, but also indicates the temporality of the comfort brought by these accomplishments.
The things she achieves are not enough to solve her problems.
The question of whether Mrs. Pyy is a victim of blind chance or a perpetrator of her own tragedy is a crucial factor in discerning the causal interactions in the novel. From the external perspective, statistically unlikely events and (negative) coincidences generate causal uncertainty, which affects the character’s life path: familiar causes fail to produce their anticipated effects. Causation involves action by some sort of intentional agent, either the characters themselves or some higher power steering the course of events. Causation also reflects pro-generative paths by which things spring from one another. Often it is the linear progression of events that is interrupted as the causal-linear patterns of narrative are called into question (cf. Richardson 2005: 51). Moreover, causation can be conceived as being necessary, with sufficient conditions having to be fulfilled in order to set the cause of a certain effect in motion. Before a particular outcome can be realized, all the components of the result must converge in the space and time of the fictional world. In mistimed tragic plots, the convergence of the different components produces negative outcomes and unfortunate
coincidences. Characters are in the wrong place at the wrong time (or in the right place at the wrong time or vice versa).173
Mrs. Pyy’s conviction of herself as a victim of circumstances (and other people’s hostility) gives rise to further elaborations on her careless actions and her contemplation of unhappy coincidences in her life. Accidents are failures having either sad or happy consequences. They are “incursions of randomness into the realm of purposefulness”(Doležel 1998: 61). While Mrs. Pyy’s actions are not intentional in the full meaning of the word (since their causes are not intended), they are still the direct causes of her actions.174 Mrs. Pyy is constantly making decisions, all of which lead to action and worsen the situation in which she finds herself. The action modes of irrationality and impulsion stem from Mrs. Pyy’s emotional perseverance.
Lost in the mazes of her conditioned fear, she is unable to break the cycles of her behavior, is predestined to follow the old, rigid and inflexible rules, even if she is often aware of the more rational ways of behaving. Irrationality culminates in Mrs. Pyy’s states of “madness,” which is the most extreme manifestation of the pathological impact of nature on a person. (Ibid.: 71–
72, 78) 175
Counterfactual agency dealing with the question of whether the character can be seen as a perpetrator of circumstances (self-focused counterfactuals) or as a victim (externally-focused counterfactuals) directs the interpretation of the causal connections linking the antecedent to the consequent in coun-terfactual speculations. (Dannenberg 2008: 112) In councoun-terfactual plots, the speculations about possible life trajectories are often caused by difficulties faced during the decision-making process. It is the characters’ inability to make reliable decisions that leads to their thought experiments about how their lives might have developed differently. “For me, the decision-making has always been the hardest part” (K, 274), Mrs. Pyy confesses.176
As a counterfactualizing agent, Mrs. Pyy does not want to accept the role of an intentional perpetrator. By consciously or unconsciously misreading the people around her and laying the blame for her problems on them, she can still nourish to some degree the false fantasies about her great talent had she had a chance to become something other than an ordinary housewife.
While remaining passive, Mrs. Pyy keeps waiting for someone to come and awaken her, as if she is unable to resolve her own anxieties. By evoking the fairytale of sleeping beauty (who waits to be rescued by a prince), Mrs.
Pyy’s life story draws attention to the contradiction between her desire to be rescued and at the same time become a rescuer who takes fate into her own hands. Indeed, Vartio’s storyworlds are often ruled by chance, but most often the actual reason for the experience of contingency is found in the characters’ deluded ways of seeing and “knowing” the world. The tendency of the human mind to lie to itself suggests that the experience of contingency stems from the inner chaos projected into the external world rather than from the actual randomness affecting an individual’s life choices.
The vast, dark regions of motivations are related to the human desire to
The vast, dark regions of motivations are related to the human desire to