Politics of literary humour and contested narrative identity (of a region with no identity)

Introduction

From a socially critical point of view, humour, and irony in particular, is an interesting and highly complicated narrative mode. Humour is commonly approached as an apolitical antidote to seriousness. The question of the seriousness of fun and the funniness of serious have conventionally been perceived as semantic paradoxes, although if we closely parse the content of humour, it relatively often proves to be embedded in social reality, and is often highly politically charged. In terms of spatial and regional contexts, and especially in relations to social injustice, literary humour likely plays a more important and serious role than it would at first seem. ¹ ‘Regional prejudices’ may result in ‘geographical jokes’, ² while flipped the other way around, making fun of our neighbour countries and racist jokes, for instance, function as ways through which people establish their social self-identities – a way in which ‘we’ separate ourselves from ‘them’. In that sense, humour can turn into a political tool of ‘othering’, ³ yet humour can also be used as a means to express criticism and raise consciousness of social power relations. As emphasized in Bakhtin’s classic work Rabelais and His World, laughter, in the case of Bakhtin, folk humour and carnival, can be perceived as a shared, confronting attitude towards prevailing power structures. ⁴

In geographical studies of literature it is often pointed out that literature functions in many ways as a route to arouse people’s regional self-consciousness, which in the case of marginalized regions is linked with questions about how literature can be used as a ‘tool’ which enables socially critical arguments to be stated. The focus in this paper is on how literary humour works as a unique form of narrative tool through which the processes of building regional identities, as well as the processes of criticism towards hegemonic narratives, are put into practice. In the case of narratives, it is not crucial what happens but rather how the stories are told. ⁵ As a narrative voice, humour possesses potential productive power in the processes of constituting, epitomizing and reinforcing identities of gender, ethnicity and region. ⁶ The term ‘narrative identity’ is commonly used to refer to the ways how individuals construct their personal stories within certain social circumstances, as well as how communities construct their spatial identities through stories, ⁷ and also how national and regional representations function as overlapping meta-narratives. ⁸ At their core narratives are representations constrained by social norms, values and relations of power, simultaneously recreated through their own representations. ⁹ Narrativity is thus a social ‘performance’ in which spatial processes and discourses of inclusion and exclusion become ‘storied’ and also rationalized. ¹⁰ A number of studies of humour have explicitly pointed out how group identities are embedded as well as established through storied humour. ¹¹ Humour is an inseparable element of narrativization; ¹² people use humour, both as a rhetoric device and as an outlook, in the process of fixing, organizing, representing and reasoning their personal experiences, as well as in identity perception.

The main emphasis of this paper is focused on investigating how literary humour is used in the process of narrativizing the history and identity of the Tornedalen (Torne Valley) region of Sweden. The formation of regional identity in Tornedalen has been a long process in which various social, political and cultural practices have been employed to institutionalize the region into the Swedish region system. ¹³ This historical process has been commonly referred to as a period of ‘Swedification’, the continuum of social and cultural practices through which the region’s marginal position within Swedish society has been legitimized. This paper examines how the questions of spatiality and otherness are embedded in the humour of the local novelist Mikael Niemi’s (1959–) breakthrough novel Popularmusik Från Vittula ¹⁴ (Eng. Popular Music from Vittula ¹⁵ ) (2000), and how these questions are constructed, but also contested through the humorous depictions of the common regional stereotypes of Tornedalen, such as alcoholism attached to Finnishness, conservative religiousness (Laestadianism), patriarchalism, masculinity and northernness. By employing a metafictive reading of literary humour, this paper aims to dissect how literary imaginativeness, social structures, local identities, otherness as well as the processes of their emancipation are interconnected.

Literary geography and the metafictive reading of humour

In the geographical studies of literature in the 1960s it was often emphasized that a regionalist text is a process through which a region, along with its people and environment, becomes repossessed and attached to one’s own self-identity. Places become individuals with their own features and specific personal characteristics. For a long time it has been argued that all regional literature is characterized by a focus on man’s relation to his environment [sic] and the ‘everyday life of a locality’. ¹⁶ For those who have never visited, a text written by a regionalist opens a gateway allowing a deeper look into the locality. ¹⁷ A regionalist builds a bridge to people’s articulations over their perceptions concerning identity, spatiality and ‘the other’ – articulations which otherwise would remain silent. ¹⁸ Regional consciousness is conditioned by social circumstances, ¹⁹ and thus regional literature functions as an active participant in the processes by which regional identities are socially constructed and mediated into people’s regional consciousness ²⁰ by diverting the ways regions are socially remembered, shared and narrated. ²¹ For some writers this may also be a conscious act aiming to ‘advertise’ the region to the ‘outside world’. ²² John Tomaney has emphasized the storied nature of regional identity and argues that ‘collective identities are not pre-given, but draw on discourses to which intellectuals, cultural producers, and political leaders contribute’, ²³ at the same time implying that literary story-telling works as a social institution which can have political implications.

Writing is a matter of social power, and in similar vein social power is a matter of producing narratives that sustain and naturalize the spatial world. ²⁴ Literature is a practice or tool with which commonly shared social memories as well as social power-relations are sustained. ²⁵ Fantasy literature, for instance, does not aim to escape social reality, but rather is thoroughly socially embedded, drawing upon the tropes of otherness; in fantasy it is easily underlined how confronting the strange ‘other’ is a basis for the feeling of moral superiority. ²⁶ The question of the imaginativeness of space and society has been a relevant topic when discussing the relationship between fiction, stereotypes, power and the social processes of othering. ²⁷ Along the lines of the postcolonial perspectives, geographical research of literature has focused more on questions such as how literature functions as a guidebook for the ideologies of imperialism, ²⁸ how literature, as a socio-cultural institution, constructs geographical discourses of otherness, ²⁹ and how social institutions rooted in literature function as moral and ideological gatekeepers. ³⁰ Similarly, in recent years, the socially critical approach to literary geography has started to pay increasing attention to women’s position in society, especially from the viewpoint of how the usage of space is directed and delimited by gender, ³¹ as well as how certain spaces such as gardens ³² and wilderness ³³ are sexually charged.

Although during recent years it has been strongly emphasized that literature is an institution which maintains the structures of spatial inequality, literature can also function as an emancipatory tool for contesting processes of othering such as regional marginalization. Literature possesses the potential to jar readers and acquaint them with socially critical matters. ³⁴ Through literary narratives, normative values, ³⁵ stereotypic conceptions ³⁶ and hegemonic myths and codes of behaviour ³⁷ can be contested, either unconsciously or in a more deliberate manner. For instance, through analysis of narratives on food in contemporary fiction and fictionalized autobiographical narratives, it has been argued that food functions as a tool for gaining independence and as a means of negotiating migrant identities. ³⁸ Thus, literature operates as an intervention into systems of ‘being different’. ³⁹

For ethnic and linguistic minorities, these literary counter-narratives represent a means through which hegemonic discourses can be contested, collective memories embodied and sociocultural self-identities established and performed. This emancipatory potential of literature is particularly relevant with respect to the institution of humour. Although it is a commonly shared perception that humour directed at minorities is by its nature insulting, ⁴⁰ representing a socio-cultural practice of humiliating, ‘othering’, sexism and racism, ⁴¹ in studies on humour it has also been recognized how for instance ethnic humour may also play a social function with respect to hostility ⁴² and alleviating the fear of the unknown. ⁴³ Humour possesses a shared social purpose for fostering group cohesion and social bonding, as well as creation and preservation of group identity. ⁴⁴ In the case of marginalized regions, the accessory function of humour is crucial for instance with respect to how self-mocking works as a tool with which group self-identities are reflected and storied. ⁴⁵ In addition, humour functions not only as a narrative ‘tool’ but also as a wider perspective through which narratives as well as counter-narratives are told and perceived.

The ways in which narrative humour, especially irony, is connected with the questions of space, society and power, can be approached through the concept of ‘metafiction’. The concept of ‘metafiction’ was first used by William H. Gass in Fiction and Figures of Life (1970), where he defined it as ‘fiction which draws attention to itself as an artefact to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality’. ⁴⁶ As a literary approach, metafictiveness refers to the manner in which a text composes its meanings by pondering over its own appearance and structure, thus being apparently conscious of its own narrative solutions and the discourses behind them. ⁴⁷ Metafictive literature is self-consciously aware that the author is presenting imaginative discourses of reality and not reality as such, ⁴⁸ while irony functions as a metafictive manner of positioning the text in relation to its own subject matter and wider social context, that is, a manner of deconstructing the intertextual structures of its own making. ⁴⁹ From a methodological point of view, this means that ‘reading ironically’ becomes a method of its own in which the discursive and imaginative structures of space, culture and society are ‘revealed’ to the reader during the reading process. ⁵⁰

On the other hand, it has been argued that the core of irony will always remain beyond representation simply because in irony the intended meanings have to be discerned outside what is revealed. John E. Seery states that one ‘maddening aspect’ of irony is that ‘certain textual incongruities (he seems to be winking at me) appear deliberate and yet the poor reader can find no explicit authorial account for them’. ⁵¹ Seery considers this a reason for why deconstructive strategies consistently fail to arrest irony. In this light, the practices of perceiving the (textual) world through irony and reading ironical narratives critically come close to the approaches of non-representational theories. ⁵² While applying a non-representational approach, Brigstocke has argued how more attention should be paid to the affective aspects of humour, especially in terms of how humour operates within the context of our place experiences. Still, as Brigstocke himself states, deconstructive methods have ‘proved highly effective in uncovering the ways in which humour operates in the production, reproduction and contestation of hegemonic identities and representations’. ⁵³ No matter how impossible it would be to catch the very core of irony, it is important to emphasize that reading ironically, in itself, functions as a linguistic and perceptual device that can be used to deconstruct the history of narrative. ⁵⁴ Turning a narration upside down operates as a method for proving how elusive and provisional discursive constructions are. ⁵⁵ Albeit ironic narrations contain information which cannot be conveyed through literal utterances, ⁵⁶ they also have the characteristic of revealing to the reader information ‘hidden’ in the discursive structures. ⁵⁷ Although irony may sometimes seem close to lying, or difficult to distinguish from it, it is still evident that ironic expressions always ‘attempt’ to be found, to be transparent and not hidden. ⁵⁸

Humour, in itself, and irony in particular, is a socially charged manner of perceiving and criticizing the world, but the discussion concerning the political and emancipatory nature of humour includes the crucial question of whether humour functions primarily affirmatively or destructively. ⁵⁹ In feminist, postcolonial, gay and lesbian theories it is commonly argued, or assumed, that humour, especially irony, works in a positive way, as a powerful tool against dominant authorities. In similar fashion it is commonly, and naturally, supposed that viewing irony as negating is an argument held exclusively by those who have been on the receiving side of ironic attack. Irony focused on ethnic stereotypes, for instance, may contain a critical message directed at dominant authorities, while from the perspective of the ethnicity in question the deconstructive effect is, for understandable reasons, hard to appreciate.

Mikael Niemi and the marginalization in Tornedalen

When Finland was incorporated into Russia in 1809, the border between Sweden and Russia was situated at the Torne River, through a Finnish-speaking region which had a centuries-long history of belonging culturally to Finland and politically to Sweden. A part of the Finnish-speaking population was left in ‘isolation’ beyond the border and consequently their Finnish developed into a language of its own, called Meänkieli (lit. ‘our language’). This Finnish-speaking regional minority, located in Tornedalen on the Swedish side of the Torne River, was subject to powerful linguistic and cultural integration pressures from the late 19th century until the middle of the 20th century, regarded as an ethnically inferior population, the ‘other’, compared with the Swedish-speaking majority, and considered a threat to national security, living in close proximity to the Russian foe and the state border. ⁶⁰ Pressure to assimilate Tornedalen into the Swedish region system and related hostility continued through the early 20th century until relations with newly independent Finland improved. ⁶¹ Through institutional control, especially that of the school-system, the marginalization of Tornedalen became a concrete and mundane part of people’s lives. For instance, speaking Finnish/Meänkieli in schools was forbidden during the first half of the 20th century. ⁶²

As Lehtinen argues, ‘for multilingual people living in the borderlands, the complex realities of social and linguistic multiplicity can lead to a kind of silent suffering in the form of confusion, ambiguity, and the experience of cultural annihilation’. ⁶³ The process of Swedification implanted low self-esteem as well as several gradually approved, subjugating stereotypes as a part of the population’s (regional) identity, which have remained ever since. In a similar way as in the case of England where the stereotypic image/myth of rural life has become embedded and sustained in English literature, ⁶⁴ on the level of Swedish popular representations, northern regions are represented as an ‘internal other’, strongly associated with the opposite of modernity, culture and education. Norrland, the northern region of Sweden, is used as a metonym for an abstract, essentialized geographical category of backward and traditional rural space in contrast to the equally essentialized urban modern areas of the South. The categorization of ‘rural North’ and ‘urban South’ are explained in terms of ‘cultural differences’ and ‘lifestyle choices’. For a long time Tornedalen has been associated with stereotypes of backwardness, overt and ample respect for the local conservative religion (Laestadianism), patriarchalism, masculinity, domestic violence and alcoholism. ⁶⁵

Acknowledgement of Tornedalen’s social marginalization gained prominence remarkably in the 1970s, and in the wake of the ‘ethnic renaissance’ of the late 20th century a rise in social self-esteem and desire to preserve the local culture and language has become stronger. ⁶⁶ The stigma of being different turned into something to be proud of, and for example in promotion campaigns and local travel brochures ‘the border culture’ has been presented as a resource, ‘strength to live side by side’, which was combined with marketing strategies leaning on the images of high quality of life. ⁶⁷ Similarly, several EU-funded cross-border projects have been established with the object of increasing the consciousness and esteem of ‘our own’ regional identity through cultural and artistic work and thereby deconstruct and re-narrate the histories of Tornedalen. ⁶⁸ Still, Tornedalen has often been considered an example of a region in which, due to its non-administrative function, the questions and definitions of citizenship have become continuously problematized and politicized. ⁶⁹ Similarly, the claims about shared ancestry and culture have also been criticized, for instance by pointing out that the literary narratives of the authors in Tornedalen which refer to the local ethnicity as ‘the homogeneity of the people’ are in many ways contradictive. ⁷⁰ Even so, the crucial point here is that such discussion still exists.

Although the issue of the social status of the Meänkieli speaking minority had been a subject of much debate and work at the local and regional levels, the region aroused little national or international interest until Mikael Niemi, a novelist from the small community of Pajala in Tornedalen, published his breakthrough novel Popularmusik Från Vittula in 2000, the same year when Meänkieli and Meänkieli-speaking people achieved official status as linguistic and ethnic minorities in Sweden. Niemi was born 13 August 1959 in Pajala, in northern Sweden, and moved to Luleå in 1977 and returned to Pajala in 1997 to continue his long-lasting literary project, eventually published under title Popularmusik Från Vittula. Niemi himself has a Meänkieli-speaking father and Swedish-speaking mother, and although Meänkieli was not spoken in Niemi’s home and Niemi himself does not speak Meänkieli, the daily routines between the two cultures has still been a concrete personal experience for him. Popularmusik Från Vittula was his first published work, although he had self-published poems, short stories and youth novels previously. The book was an immediate best-seller in Scandinavia and was translated into several languages and won several awards, including the respected August Prize of the Swedish Publishers’ Association. Until 2008, the book had sold over 840,000 copies in 31 countries. ⁷¹ After being made into a film in 2004, the success of book as well as the national acknowledgement of the Tornedalen region increased, which became manifested for instance in form of increasing tourism in the region. ⁷² After Popularmusik Från Vittula, Niemi has published six major works. As a result of the success of Popularmusik Från Vittula, Tornedalen has become well-known and has stepped out of the margin; and the novel represents one of the most important practices through which the deconstructing processes were established. As Birger Winsa formulates it, ‘the authorship of Mikael Niemi is the key concept in this process of creating a cultural infrastructure that enhances minority identity and linguistic diversity and providing cultural events of the autochthonous minority for the tourists and local people and thereby promoting economic development’. ⁷³ At the same time cultural and artistic work has constituted a powerful narrative means for mediating the collective memory of the region, ⁷⁴ and through the success of the book and especially its filmatization, this work has become ever more recognized.

Populärmusik Från Vittula is a humorous story focused on a Finnish/Meänkieli-speaking young boy Matti and his friend Niila growing up in Pajala, Tornedalen, written with an eye for folk tradition. The story follows life in Pajala in the 1960s and ‘70s, and, as the title of the book alludes, the main focus is on the arrival and influences of popular culture in young boys’ life in an overtly conservative and backward northern rural village. The novel can be read as a hilarious story about two young boys growing up ‘somewhere up there in the North’, but it can also be read as a socially critical narrative in which the history of Swedification is critically problematized through witty sarcasm. In order to discern the socially critical viewpoint in the irony, in this case Mikael Niemi’s Popularmusik Från Vittula, it is essential to be acquainted with the cultural, social and historical background of the narrative. As a curiosity: to help non-Swedish/-Finnish readers understand the cultural contexts of Tornedalen, Laurie Thomson added a huge amount of extra text in his English translation – especially explanations of several local expressions. ⁷⁵ The irony in Niemi’s work is constructed around features commonly interpreted as stereotypic characteristic of the local and regional. In terms of the history of the Tornedalen region, however, it is important to note that the key focus of Niemi’s sarcasm is on the social process of subordination and its effect on the development of human and regional identity. The everyday life of being marginalized and othered is altered in ironic fashion into the foundation of region’s identity, or to put it another way, it becomes the main identity of a ‘region with no identity’.

Popular music from Vittula: irony of living in a region with no identity

We gradually caught on to the fact that where we lived wasn’t really a part of Sweden. We’d just been sort of tagged on by accident . . . We were different, a bit inferior, a bit uneducated, a bit simple-minded. We didn’t have any deer or hedgehogs or nightingales. We didn’t have any celebrities. We didn’t have any theme parks. No traffic lights, no mansions, no country squires. All we had was masses and masses of mosquitoes, Tornedalen-Finnish swear-words, and Communists.

Ours was a childhood of deprivation. Not material deprivation – we had enough to get by on – but a lack of identity. We were nobody. Our parents were nobody. Our forefathers had made no mark whatsoever on Swedish history. Our last names were unspellable, not to mention being unpronounceable for the few substitute teachers who found their way up north from the real Sweden . . . We spoke with a Finnish accent without being Finnish, and we spoke without Swedish accent without being Swedish.

We were nothing. ⁷⁶

The themes through which narrative regional identities can be identified include, to quote Tomanay, elements such as ‘the uses of history in identity formation, issues of landscape and language, issues of universalism versus particularism in social practice, and the relationships between culture and institutions in the making of regional identities’. ⁷⁷ From the above excerpt, the mentioning of ‘a bit inferior’, ‘a bit uneducated’, ‘a bit simple-minded’ represent iconic labels for the constellation of themes and discourses upon which Niemi’s parodying of Tornedalen and its regional identity becomes narrated. ‘A bit inferior’ refers to the socio-cultural tradition of how living in a distant corner of the world has become a key characteristic of people’s regional identity. On a mundane level being ‘a bit inferior’ is also a reference to practises such as speaking an unrecognizable language, inability to function in hegemonic (Swedish) and modern society, that is, being ‘a bit uneducated’. The matter of being ‘a bit simple-minded’ refers to the stereotype of masculine primitiveness and alcoholism, characteristics which are proliferated in contemporary media and which have long been linked with Finnish roots. ⁷⁸ This is in connection with the 19th-century discourse in which in international representations Social Darwinism depicted the Finnish people as a Mongoloid race. ⁷⁹

In the case of Popularmusik Från Vittula, the narrative voice is not that of Mikael Niemi’s, but that of an internally ‘subalterned’ young boy, a voice which is generated through parodying the history of Northern Sweden which may, depending on the stance of a reader, make the story extremely funny or even the opposite. There are several options for reading, understanding and approaching the above extract from Niemi’s novel. Read as an honest description of the regional identity of Tornedalen, the text is far too overtly dark and pessimistic to be taken seriously. For example, in the previous excerpt the young boy’s consciousness of being regionally othered is lusciously exaggerated through the sarcastic duplication of the word ‘we’, which is used 24 times (and the word ‘our’ six times) within one page. There is a certain knowing wink of the eye present in the text and, as a reader becomes aware of this, the novel is essentially a humorous story; it is naturally taken for granted that reader will find exaggerated self-pity amusing. On the other hand, if the reader acknowledges the metafictional nature of the text and the discursive background of the region’s history, and the implicit tradition of linguistic subjugation and sociocultural otherness, the above excerpt might not necessarily feel so unreservedly amusing. But still, the reader may laugh at it. And this is the way how the politics of humour works. For an ironical statement to be successful, it is also crucial that the receiver is conscious of the fact that the literary statement is in discordance with the intended meaning: ‘successful irony involves an opposition between a literal statement and what the receiver takes to be the sender’s belief’. ⁸⁰ This is in line with Linda Hutcheon’s manner of distinguishing irony from other figures of speech by using the concept of (irony’s) ‘edge’: ‘Unlike metaphor or metonymy irony has an edge; unlike paradox, irony is decidedly edgy’. ⁸¹ Hutcheon highlights how semantic ambiguity and irony are not the same thing, since irony alone has this edge. ⁸²

In studies of regional narratives it is constantly stressed that landscape, as a geo-graphical element, is a key factor in the process of how ‘personalities’ of regions and places become evoked. ⁸³ However, in the case of Mikael Niemi’s Pajala/Tornedalen, landscape descriptions are not dominant. Niemi’s focus is rather on the identity markers of what living in an internally othered region means in everyday life. Instead of physical surroundings, local dialect is a cornerstone in this discourse, although it has been argued, for instance by Tomaney, ⁸⁴ that landscape and dialect may be intrinsically linked together if there is a relationship between dialect and topographical nomenclature. In Niemi’s novel the basic geographical question ‘where are we?’, i.e. the spatiality and situationality of being ‘a bit inferior’, is important in terms of how the identity of the region and its people – and ironically their low self-esteem – are constructed. In a scene in which the main character of the story is at his first day of school, the cartographical position of Pajala is intriguingly entwined with the question of the region’s socio-cultural position in Swedish society:

As a citizen of Pajala, you were inferior – that was clear from the very beginning. Skåne, in the far south, came first in the atlas, printed on an extra-large scale, completely covered in red lines denoting main roads and black dots representing towns and villages. Then came the other provinces on a normal scale, moving farther north page by page. Last of all was Northern Norrland, on an extra-small scale in order to fit onto the page, but even so there were hardly any dots at all. Almost at the very top of the map was Pajala, surrounded by brown-colored tundra, and that was where we lived. ⁸⁵

It has been emphasized how uniquenesses of regions construct the discourses of national unity myths which are constructed through literary imaginations. ⁸⁶ In Niemi’s work the main character of the story, a young boy Matti, begins constructing his regional identity and socio-cultural position in Swedish society by parsing a map on his first day at school. To a young boy the distances, colours and dots on the map are given, but as we know, meanings related to space, scales and spatial histories are not pre-given but rather transformative and imaginative narratives of being and becoming different. ⁸⁷ Growing and living in the margin is a question of ‘everyday backwardness’, ⁸⁸ the black irony of living in a region with ‘hardly any dots at all’ on its map. While the previous passage has been used as a formative example of what the lack of understanding of the nature of multiculturalism means in practice in a multilayered society, ⁸⁹ it can also be used as an example of establishing a unique narrative types for a region that does not ‘fit’ into the nationalist region system and has been relegated to a marginal role in order to construct the hegemonic, national region-narrative; ⁹⁰ and possessing Finnish roots are nothing to be proud of:

Twenty kids with loose milk teeth and knuckles covered in warts. Some had speech defects, other wore glasses, many spoke Finnish at home, several were used to receiving a good beating if they stepped out of line, nearly everybody was shy and came from working-class homes, and knew from the start they didn’t belong here.

Our teacher was a matron in her sixties with round, steel-framed glasses, her hair in a bun contained by a net pierced with pins, and she had a long, hooked nose that made her look like an owl. She always wore a woollen skirt and a blouse, often a cardigan buttoned halfway up, and soft, black shoes like slippers. She approached her duties gently but firmly, intent on carving out of the roughly sawed planks confronting her something neat and presentable, and capable of coping with Swedish society. ⁹¹

The consciousness of being different, internally othered, living in a region with no identity, is made in such an over-exaggerated manner that it turns into a joke, allowing the reader the option of laughing at apparently serious issues; yet it is not that simple a question – at what or whom is the laughter is directed and who is actually laughing? In this context ‘to intend’ does not literally equate with ‘to mean’, since irony is an interpretative process ‘that involves not only the making of meaning but the construction of a sense of evaluative attitude displayed by the text toward what is said and what is not said’. ⁹² As can be seen from the previous example, the main theme through which the identity of being othered is depicted concerns the discourse of Finnishness, while the backwardness attached to Finnish roots is in straight-forwardly connected to the societal status of the Meänkieli language. Depending on the estimations, approximately 30% of the population of Norbotten speaks Meänkieli, a language which within Swedish society represents an antithesis to Southern dialects. This juxtaposition becomes parodied when a new teacher from Skåne, in southern Sweden, arrives to Pajala. The teacher, to everyone’s surprise, eventually turns out to be one of the few people in Tornedalen who can, with certain conditions, understand both Meänkieli and the dialect of Skåne; for him, there were six topics with which it was possible to have a conversation with locals, listed in a parodic way presented as a numbered list:

Farming, with all its peculiar curiosities, is the only possible topic of conversation between two peoples from different sociocultural backgrounds (southern Sweden and Tornedalen), common ground for two remote languages, for culture-people and nature-people. But ultimately, the politically charged joke is at the expanse of Finnishness. In similar fashion as in the United States, where rednecks, poor rural white people, are invariably represented as the antithesis of civilization, ⁹⁴ Finnishness, and Meänkieli as its parole, demarcates everything that is opposite of civilization. In fact, it is interesting that in group discussion studies on how Finnishness is represented in Sweden it has been specifically pointed out how narrations in discussions are always presented with laughter and how negative associations about Finns and Finnishness were constantly ‘played down with humour’. ⁹⁵ Finnish roots, in itself, is an authorization of a joke, at the same time functioning as a legitimization of the low self-esteem and otherness of the region in which the novel’s main characters live. Finnishness as an authorization of humour becomes evident in an ironically ‘poetic’ description of Finnish women:

The men also congratulated themselves on being smart enough to pick wives from Finland, since they were as tough as oak trees, as patient as reindeer, and as pretty as birches by blue northern lakes, and they also had large backsides that enabled them to give birth to fine healthy babies easily and often. ⁹⁶

The low social position of women in Tornedalen, in the context of Swedish society, has been considered as one of the key characteristics or manifestations reflecting the region’s marginality. It has been criticized that the mundane subordination of women in Tornedalen has been nationally accepted as a natural characteristic of the region and its identity by historians, politicians, and by most ordinary people as well. ⁹⁷ This is in close connection with another cultural tradition of Tornedalen, Laestadianism, a conservative Lutheran revivalist movement, (often considered comically conservative), born during the middle of the 19th century. Since the founder of Laestadianism, Lars Levi Laestadius (1800–61), was born in Pajala, the heritage of Laestadianism is reflected in many ways in local daily practices. The social norms and codes of Laestadianism, especially the belief that rhythmic music, alcohol, make-up, TV, birth control, and pre-marital sex are forbidden by God, automatically direct and demarcate the codes of how women should behave. Since children are believed to be a gift from God, it is better for a decent Laestadian woman to have a large backside, isn’t it? The norms and codes of Laestadianism are parodied throughout Niemi’s work in several ways. In similar fashion to how Jason Dittmer argues that a comic book can be seen as an example of a deliverer of morality tales, ⁹⁸ Niemi’s work can be approached as an example of a (deconstructive) parody of morality tales. While the usage of alcohol is forbidden within the codes of Laestadianism, Niemi parodies how this does not mean that it would be absent from the regional character or everyday practices:

Now was the right moment for the first schnapps. The bottle was conveyed with due solemnity to the table by the old biddy who was the least religious of those present. ⁹⁹

Humour functions as a route for discussing taboos. There are two theories according to which humour, on the one hand, operates as a ‘safety-valve’ for anti-social impulses, and on the other, jokes are used as stages in negotiating about how to introduce taboo subjects into everyday discourse. ¹⁰⁰ It has been argued that humour possesses a shared social purpose for helping group cohesion and social bonding, creation and preservation of group identity, ¹⁰¹ but in the case of Niemi’s Tornedalen, the identity of a group, or rather the lack of it, is narrated through underlining social backwardness and old-fashioned lifestyles. Laestadianism is a dead weight for people in Niemi’s Pajala:

Faith is not enough for a Laestadian. It’s not just a question of being baptized or confessing your sins or putting money in the collection plate. Your faith has to be a living faith. An old Laestadian preacher was once asked how he would describe this living faith. He considered for quite a while, then answered thoughtfully that it was like spending the whole of your life walking uphill …

The road just keeps on going up and up. The forest is the same as before, with stretches of bog and brushwood and here and there an ugly clear-felled patch. But it’s still uphill. ¹⁰²

In regional geography it has often been emphasized that narratives of regional identity rely on miscellaneous elements, such as ideas about nature, ethnicity, dialects, periphery/centre relations, marginalization and stereotypic images of a people/community, and that they are used in contextually in different forms of social practices, rituals and discourses. ¹⁰³ Niemi formulates the description of living in Tornedalen as a Laestadian as an allegoric narration of wandering in a northern wilderness, at the same ironically giving a stereotypic and unflattering characterization of the region’s main tourist attraction, its natural environment. The Tornedalian wandering in the previous excerpt finally reaches his heaven when he eventually arrives at Muodoslompolo, the northernmost village in the municipality of Pajala. Although it has been argued that Niemi’s Pajala is quite distinct from traditional regionalism, and rather represents some form of ‘fictive geography’, a fictive world of its own named ‘Pajala’, ¹⁰⁴ Niemi’s novel bites firmly to the question of what living in an internally othered region, a region with no identity, means in practice. Within this light, it is interesting to acknowledge that the depression of living in a region that is ‘a bit inferior’ with no identity is not considered an inevitable burden by everyone, at least not by local tourism developers, who interestingly, and self-ironically, turn the social sarcasm of Niemi’s work into an aspect of their commercial strategy. Pajala is advertised, with a wink of the eye, by co-opting the above-mentioned ironic quotation from Niemi’s novel into a title for their commercial brochure: ‘Vittula: A lifelong uphill climb, like the road between Pajala and Muodoslompolo’. ¹⁰⁵ Thus the success of Niemi’s work, for all its sarcasm focused on the negative aspects of Tornedalen, has become, rather ironically, canonized in the region’s image and identity – another example of what irony’s ‘edge’ means in practice.

Afterword: socio-politics of reading irony

The arguments in this paper concern how humour is hardly ever harmless, and is always socially embedded. In several cases this refers to how humour may be a serious matter, while on the other hand it can also function as an emancipatory route through which identity narratives for marginalized regions can be written in alternative manner. Still, it is always possible, and even assumed, that after making such a narrative statement, there would occur a critical and justified counter-statement to the question “does humour really make difference”? Yap, for example, has criticized the close readings by literary geographers on the grounds that such interpretations are just interpretations, and that when dissecting the real unfixed textual meanings and impacts of literature, the focus should rather be on reader, in for instance through the form of reception analysis. ¹⁰⁶ While it is true that if we desire to study the connections between people’s regional self-consciousness, literary humour and socio-political dimensions, and thus problematize their real-world influences, reception analysis could be a useful method. In the context of this research, this would mean that reception analysis could be used as a tool for the verification, or falsification, of presumed arguments, which has not been the intention or interest of this paper. Rather, the key argument here has been that perceiving the world through humour, and humour through social critique, are alternative strategies for acknowledging, understanding and interpreting the processes on-going in space and society. In ‘conventional reading’ the semiotic positions of the words and metaphors and their relations to wider social discourses often remain unnoticed, but if the world is approached in a metafictive manner by using humour as an interpretative device, it allows both the author and the reader to delve deeper and discover the discursiveness and imaginativeness of reality which lies behind the words. ¹⁰⁷

Still, it is crucial to note that in order to have influence, to make a difference, a text must be accessible within a certain social situation. It is a matter of the spatial context within which narrations take place or ‘happen’, as Hones phrases it. ¹⁰⁸ Niemi’s work did not happen in a vacuum. The societal position of Meänkieli has been a topical issue of discussion in the region before Niemi’s literature; especially the artistic and cultural work of Bengt Pohjanen, which used Meänkieli as the main building block to forge a new territorial identity, created a background against which the interpretation of Niemi’s work through its political aspects became more natural. ¹⁰⁹ In a similar way as in the case of Pohjanen’s ‘Meänmaa’, the regional identity of a region with no identity in Niemi’s work represents a counter-narrative to hegemonic Swedish nation-state narratives, and can be seen as an example of how parody and politics become entwined. But in the end, the matter of considering humorous texts socially charged and relevant is ultimately a matter of the reader’s choice and perspective.

As mentioned earlier, in literary geography the social and political aspects and impacts of literature have been acknowledged, but it is also important to remember that social relevance can be found in texts that at first glance may seem apolitical and far from serious. What metafictive reading of humour does first and foremost is that it proves how fiction is historically conditional and how history, vice versa, is conditioned discursively. ¹¹⁰ Facts as such are not ironic – they become ironic only after they are perceived against some other facts, ¹¹¹ within the context of certain (social and political) discourses. Humour has conventionally been considered a linguistic system helping to enforce and keep marginalized communities on the margins, but the intention here has been to illustrate that perceiving the world through (the linguistic system of) humour can also be a process for narrativizing regional histories and identities, even a method for contesting prevailing power relations and hegemonic narrations. ¹¹² Thus, humour is a socially relevant creative practice, a serious issue – one which also should be taken seriously. In order to understand how people’s spatial identities, society and the cultural institutions are connected, humour is probably not the easiest method to exploit, but the purpose here has been to illustrate that, no matter how hilarious it may sound, humour may still be a route for accessing the very core of the matter.