Summary:
Marita Hietasaari, The Lapua Movement in Lars Sund’s Novel Lanthandlerskans son
Lars Sund’s historical novel Lanthandlerskans son [The Son of a Country Shopkeeper] was published in 1997. It is the second part of the so-called Siklax trilogy, which describes the life of Swedish-speaking Finns from the end of the 19th century till the present day. In Lanthandlerskans son Sund depicts the period between the world wars. In Finland it was the time of Prohibition and smuggling, but also the time of the Lapua Movement, an anticommunist movement which tested the country’s parliamentary government system during 1929–1932. I concentrate on three episodes that constitute the main chapters of the text: the description of the Peasants’ March, which the Lapua Movement organised in order to pressure the government into approving legislation against communist activities, the interview with the movement’s leader, Vihtori Kosola, and Gustav Smed’s tragicomic journey to join the movement’s failed uprising in Mäntsälä. As a theoretical background I use Linda Hutcheon’s (1989) theory of the postmodern historical novel, historiographic metafiction. For Hutcheon, the expression denotes novels that are metafictive, historical and political – just as Sund’s novels are.
The narrator’s ironical and critical attitude towards the Lapua Movement is obvious in these episodes. For example, he criticises the fact that Finnish Swedes have wanted to forget their participation in the Lapua Movement, even though one-fifth of the 12600 participants in the Peasants’ March were Swedish-speaking Finns. Lanthandlerskans son thematises – like a paradigmatic example of Hutcheon’s theory – the fact that we know the past only through its traces. The narrator, who provides a retrospective description of his own family history, uses newspapers, photographs, interviews and rumours to tell the story. He exploits the methods of the classical historical novel and historical research in a parodic way. For example, to obtain an interview with Vihtori Kosola, he raises him from the dead. The description of the decayed body of Kosola and the story of Gustav’s drunken and delirious journey to Mäntsälä are most grotesque, and both episodes degrade the Lapua Movement, which in narrator’s opinion had fascist traits and constituted a danger to the country.
In spite of these questionable methods, the narrator provides an exhaustive description of the Lapua Movement. Metafictive methods such as the unmasking of the conventions typical to realism and the use of fantasy seem paradoxically to augment the possibilities of depicting the past. Historiographic metafiction deals with traumatic, disputable and often silenced issues of the past. At the same time, it highlights the problems of historiography: the textual and ambiguous nature of documents, the habit of forgetting unpleasant facts and the inescapable inadequacy of every interpretation. Novels like Lanthandlerskans son, which bring out the research process of history, may in fact capture the past more truthfully.
