The Split Mind and the Emotions of the Body
Vartio renders Leena’s journey of self-recognition as a series of experiences that are more or less latent. The sensations of the body cannot always be recognized by the conscious mind. Leena’s estrangement is manifested in the embodied images of the split in the self, the division of the mind into a more articulate, conscious part and inarticulate sensations arising from the body: the involuntary and uncontrolled processes of maturation and pregnancy. On the one hand, Vartio generates the aesthetic illusion of Leena’s detachment by portraying mental processes that are transmitted and reflected on the level of physical, tangible reality as biological, cyclic processes similar to nature. The author conveys these embodied experiences by means of mental landscaping, by using psycho-analogies, allegorical descriptions of fictional space, cognitive metaphors, and other techniques of subtle evocation. On the other hand, distanced, embodied scenes alternate with scenes in which Vartio represents Leena’s mind from within, by providing interior and narrated monologues. These passages dramatize the tension between the conscious and the unconscious realms of her mind.
In neutral narratives, the characters’ emotional responses are often related to the repetitions of background emotions that guide the reader to keep track of the characters’ emotional fluctuations. The arousal continuum of background emotions ranges from the character being unconscious, to asleep, to awake but drowsy, to alert, to emotionally aroused. In Mies kuin mies, tyttö kuin tyttö, Vartio represents the more conscious end of the scale by combining the external and internal views of Leena’s mind, especially in the peak emotional moments involving her sexual awakening. The split in the self is actualized for the first time in the novel’s first love scene as Leena’s mind divides into two. The pronoun hän (“she”) refers to the objective, conscious awareness of the self observing the more passive, experiencing minä (“I”). In the tradition of female fiction, this technique of portraying consciousness is typically employed to generate an impression of the divided, inner and outer, parts of the self (Felski 1989: 130).32 Leena’s arousal – her heightened attention – is reflected in her physical reactions; her eyes are now “wide open”:
It was my jacket; it fell on the floor.
Her eyes were wide open and fixed on the ceiling. There were two light brown patterns on the ceiling and she thought that the roof had leaked.
Then she said to herself: It’s me; it’s me who is here.
And after a moment she asked herself: Is it me lying here?
Leena. She thought her name: Leena.
And as the hand searched for her waist and unfastened the hooks of her skirt, she thought:
My hand is helping to open the hooks.
And she raised herself up again so that her back was arched like a bridge during the time it took for the man to pull the skirt down from her hips and down her legs. And the hand lowered the skirt to the floor. (MT, 23–24)33
The man’s distanced presence in the scene is evoked by the synecdochic image of a hand, accompanied by an image of Leena’s hand assisting its moves.
The unsentimental focus on such a small image emphasizes the act of love, not as the fulfillment of a love affair, but as a rudimentary event in Leena’s development. The boundary-crossing quality of the event is expressed by Leena’s inner voice repeating her own name: “Leena. She thought her name:
Leena.” (“Leena. Hän ajatteli nimensä: Leena.”) Before the love scene, Leena is depicted writing her name in the margin of a newspaper as if practicing her signature, the designator of her identity. The deictic expressions of Leena’s speech addressed to the self (“Is it me lying here”; “Olenko minä se, joka makaa tässä”) emphasize the experiences happening “here and now,”
but also the unstable quality of self-identity. At the moment of “here and now,” something is happening to her rather than being enacted by her. In the scene, her body is observed from a distance as if a self-sustained entity making its own decisions.
I’m stripped now. This is happening to me. Now.
And then she thought: Is that my voice saying no, no?
Is it me saying I don’t want to, I don’t dare, and even so helping the hand that is undressing me now?
Is this what it’s like? This thing that is about to happen to me, this is it, now.
And she was scared and said in a loud voice, “No!”
But she couldn’t do anything anymore to get up, to leave.
Am I a fallen woman, now? (MT, 24)34
The contrast between “event” and “action” is stressed in the scene that dramatizes the split in the self into a more rational, aware mind and the primitive drives and impulses arising from within. In a paralyzed state of inaction, Leena’s body seems to be reluctant to obey the voice of reason heard in her audible words (“And she was scared and said in a loud voice:
‘No.’”) This voice of internalized social order is foregrounded in the final passage of the interior monologue: “Am I now a fallen woman, now?” The scene of the split in the self seems to stage the double function of interior monologue both as associative and as rational thought. The division of the self into two voices thematizes the layered quality of the fictional mind, which is “spontaneously” experiencing and distantly observing itself – even if the silencing of the self-address in modern interior monologues has been considered as reflecting a less rational and less rhetorical quality of self-communion (cf. Cohn 1983: 12).35
In studies of modernist mind presentation, the analysis of the unconscious has involved many misconceptions. As Cohn (1983: 77–78) points out in her critique of the focus on stream of consciousness novels, “[t]he phenomenon that interior monologue imitates is, contrary to its reputation, neither the Freudian unconscious, nor the Bergsonian inner flux, nor even the William Jamesian stream of consciousness, but quite simply the mental activity psychologists call interior language, inner speech, or, more learnedly, endophasy.”36 Endophasy involves those contents of the mind that can be called associative, flowing, impulsive, or spontaneous. However, it does not
The Split Mind and the Emotions of the Body
involve those mental processes that remain unconscious, beyond the reach of self-articulation. Rather, in addition to freely associative patterns, it pertains to psychic facts, logical and rational thinking, calculation, and conscious decision-making: emotions, sensations, and associations that come into awareness as more or less articulated, conscious thoughts or feelings.
Thus, how to approach the representation of (unconscious) emotions in modernist novels such as Mies kuin mies, tyttö kuin tyttö? Or more specifi-cally: how to delineate the spectrum of mental phenomena in a fictional setting? This is a case in point, since emotions have long been considered to be phenomena too personal, fleeting, and difficult to be approached academi-cally, including in literary studies. Various reasons have been proffered for the neglect of emotions in literary theory. In story pattern analyses, emotions have been excluded as belonging to the character paradigm, and characters, in turn, have been conceived as mere actants. In structuralist narratology, on the other hand, the concept of emotion has not fit into the debates on speech categories or other linguistic models. In addition, the influence of psychoanalysis (emphasizing such concepts as “pleasure” or “desire”) has been identified as a factor resulting in the gap of affective theory in narrative studies. (Palmer 2010: 156; Hogan 2011a: 15)
Human cognition has traditionally been associated with such conscious processes as thinking and reasoning. Mental activities like introspection, analysis, reflection, perception, memory, decision-making, speech, and other operations involving language can be added to the list. In Lubomír Doležel’s terminology, the operations of the “practical mind” (such as rational planning, reasoning, calculation, or scripting) are classified as “mental acts”
that are intentional – contributing to the configuration of the plot. “Mental events,” by contrast, are unintentionally, spontaneously – and often more locally – generated. Traditionally, these aspects of the human mind have been considered as the main focus of mind presentation in modernist fiction. Mental events include the mental processes of the “contemplative mind,” such as automatic mental images, associations, obsessive thoughts, beliefs and emotions, daydreaming, and dreams. Mental events are like uncontrollable natural forces, deeply rooted in the biological processes of the physical body. This is why it is so difficult for the conscious mind to detect and control them. (Doležel 1998: 73)
Whereas mental acts relate to the action mode that Doležel calls rational action (guided by reason, control, and cognitive motivations), mental events relate more often to actions that diminish or flout rationality: impulsive, akratic, or irrational modes of action that are triggered by a highly emotional mind. This distinction between passion and reason, feeling and thinking, emotion and cognition has a long history, starting with Plato’s conception of passions as wild horses that must be reined in by the rational intellect. The struggle between sense and emotion, the primitive and the more sophisticated realms of the mind has been portrayed as an inner battle for control of the human psyche. Impulsive acting has been perceived as stemming from drives. It is spontaneous, unpremeditated, and often reflexively stimulated. Under impulsive drives, the character’s control over her or his acting is minimized. A character’s emotionally aroused actions
typically fluctuate between the rational and the impulsive modes. An akratic mode of action is linked to “weakness of will,” also called “the Medea Principle”: a person knows the rational path, but does not follow it because she or he is being led by a drive or a passion and thus ends up performing an incorrect action. Madness, in turn, means a total lack of intentionality, as the possibilities for practical reasoning are deprived. (Doležel 1998: 71–72)
The polarity between intentional acting and spontaneous generation can be understood as corresponding to the distinction between the practical and the contemplative mind and thereby between the conscious and the unconscious processes of fictional minds, although not necessarily (Doležel 1998: 73). Even cognitive processes, such as memories, sensory perceptions, or thoughts, can be spontaneously generated. Many cognitive processes (e.g.
memory, among others) are related to involuntary psychology. Moreover, emotions, mental images, and different modes of counterfactual thought involve highly sophisticated processes of the human intellect, such as, for instance, rationalizing and entertaining oneself with possibilities. Emotions can serve as motivations for rational planning and calculation. Reasoning and thinking, by contrast, can be frenetic and disorganized, even irrational (cf. LeDoux 1998: 35–36). Hence, the division of mental functioning into a practical and contemplative mind seems to be inadequate. Both cognitive and emotional unconscious are relevant from the perspective of modernist mind presentation, in which the “dark places of psychology” (Woolf 1929/1919: 192) are often the focus of interest.37
In Mies kuin mies, tyttö kuin tyttö, the darker, unconscious aspects of emotional life are related to the embodied images that Vartio uses to portray the social stigmas of the affair. These images are introduced before the actual love scene in the episode in which Leena climbs into the man’s room.
The visual contrast of light and shadow frames the space in the stairway.
In the evening light, Leena’s climb turns into something sacred and pure, reinforced by the detail of the pure carpet. This virginal purity is contrasted to the darkness rising from below, as if from the instinctive spheres of Leena’s and the man’s minds. Leena hesitates:
The girl had stopped. The top of the staircase glowed gold, the evening sun reached to the upstairs hall window and lit the stairs from above, but the lower part was dim. The carpet on the stairs was a light color and clean.
The girl started to go up. Two stairs up, she stopped.
“Take a look: are my shoes clean?”
She lifted her foot, held it up. The man coming behind her saw the grooves of the rubber sole at eye level.
“They’re clean.” The girl felt the man’s fingers squeezing her ankle.
“Let go, I’ll fall!” She hopped on one leg and tottered.
Without glancing behind her, she continued to climb the stairs. She heard the man’s voice behind her, “You won’t fall. I’ll catch you.” (MT, 7)38
Other images of purity follow as Leena steps into the room. She observes the rag carpet on the floor “as clean as if no one had ever walked on it”
(MT, 10).39 Leena’s future “fall” is embodied in the scene with the reference to her new shoes, which are clean at the moment of her climb, but later,
The Split Mind and the Emotions of the Body
at home, Leena notices dirt on them: “What was it she’d stepped into?”
(MT, 32)40 The motif of shoes (thrown away as they gradually become completely outworn) reflects the social stigmas of adultery and extramarital pregnancy, as Leena’s future fall is written into the embodied scenes before it materializes in the storyworld. In the end, the man never catches her, mostly because Leena never lets him get involved.
After the first sexual experience, Leena feels she has changed in a fun-damental way. She is afraid that the inner change can be observed by others.
That familiar trope of self-recognition, a mirror, appears in the scene of Leena’s self-examination. The memories of the encounter with the man lead to a full and complete awareness of her body:
She took a mirror from her pocket and saw in it a pale patch and two darker spots.
Those are my eyes. The same eyes, even though the thing had happened that she feared could be seen from her face.
With her hand she touched her neck and cheeks, and when she let her hand drop limply, it brushed against her breast and flashed away as if it had touched a burning object. The touch had awakened full, clear knowledge of what had happened.
Breasts. Their name. Round bits that had traveled with her till now like a hand, leg, any body part. They had a name: breasts. She was a woman. They were a woman’s breasts. (MT, 31)41
In Leena’s initial state, the objects − the body parts − cannot be identified.
Breasts are only separate “round bits” that have been carried along as if unnoticed. They have no specific meaning. After being recognized as objects of a sexual being, the breasts are given their name. The process corresponds metonymically to Leena’s own position. The sexual awakening changes her identity, perceived mainly in relation to her bodily experience. The half-blurred image of her face and eyes (“a pale patch and two darker spots”) is accompanied by an indolent, habitual gesture of her hand (parallel to the man’s hand) and then comes a moment of sudden self-recognition, The sense of the embodied self is evoked by the touch on the breasts: “The touch had awakened full, clear knowledge of what had happened.”
In Mies kuin mies, tyttö kuin tyttö, Vartio renders the moments of Leena’s self-awareness as brief flashes of knowledge, which, however, manifest themselves as embodied sensations rather than as awareness ranging over longer periods of time. At the moment of Leena’s self-indulgence, her feeling of the self stems from self-objectification. By closing her eyes, she is able to
“see” more clearly:
I am smiling like this, she felt. And she closed her eyes as if with closed eyes she could see her own face. She raised her hand slowly, touched her cheek as if the smile had been an object whose shape she wanted to know. She ran her finger over her lips tracing their outline. [...] The man had come out from hiding; his eyes followed the movement of her hand, the hand dropped out of the air onto her face, pressed the eyes as if wanting to prevent her from seeing. […]
“This is what I’m like,” the girl said. “Look, like this.” She turned from side to side on the bed in satisfaction, stretched her arms and legs as if she had only now realized what she was like. “This is what I’m like,” she said again, this time as if surprised and asking herself something. At the same time she smiled again and stretched out her arms as if she no longer knew how she should be just then.
“Yes.” The man didn’t smile.
She saw the man against the darkness. (MT, 67–68)42
The process of becoming aware involves Leena’s pre-conscious thoughts rendered by psycho-analogy: “as if surprised and asking herself something.”
With her eyes closed, Leena distances herself from the perceptions of the external world. The trope of closed eyes refers to mental images arising in the mind when it is detached from the distractions of the material world (similar to the flood of images in Anni’s mind, as her consciousness is monitoring the dark). On the other hand, the comparison of Leena’s smile to an “object” or a “form” alludes to the character itself as a fictional construct composed of words. While Leena is getting to know her body, its parts are described one by one as part of the rhetoric of the “character,” as fictional objects integrated with names.
Leena’s mind behind her closed eyes concentrates on the sensations of the body, the physical touch of a hand, which she senses as more tangible and real in this way. Even if words have become empty and meaningless, the man’s touch has an enormous impact on Leena. The “darkness” is an element that encourages Leena and the man to encounter each other exposed and bare. In the dark they “see” each other, which, according to Leena, is the most frightening aspect of the contact: “[H]e has seen me”
(MT, 24).43 The physical, uncomplicated understanding between the lovers is illustrated by the trope of “play” typical of Vartio’s love scenes. At best, the encounter between a man and a woman is simple, as is everything else in nature: “It made them feel like laughing, as if they were playing without anyone seeing them and they realized they fit together well in the game, they understood each other from the slightest movement” (MT, 68).44 However, the man’s role in restraining Leena’s maturation is also suggested: his hand prevents Leena from “seeing.” By employing mental landscapes as a device to demonstrate Leena’s latent development, Vartio shows how the female Bildung requires an explicit refusal of the romance plot. Separation from a lover and withdrawal into the inner self are the preconditions for any path to self-knowledge.