Anna Ovaska

“Fictions of Madness” is a study about the forms and functions of representations of mental illness in literary narratives. It focuses on experiences of shattering and distress in a corpus of first-person narrated modernist Finnish novels, and examines them through four sets of questions: 1) the narrative construction of shattering minds and experiential worlds, 2) the ways readers are invited to engage with the minds and worlds created in the texts, 3) the ethical problems and power relations inherent in storytelling and in reading about mental distress and illness, and 4) the ways in which fiction generates knowledge and understanding about experiences of pain and suffering.

Drawing on a wide range of narrative theory, phenomenology, enactivist theories, and feminist theory, the study shows how fictional portrayals of “madness” employ and challenge their readers’ personal, cultural, and scientific understanding of psychiatric disability and experiences of distress. Instead of portraying minds and mental illness as disembodied or disengaged from the world, the novels discussed—Helvi Hämäläinen’s “Kaunis sielu” (The Beautiful Soul, 1928/2001), Jorma Korpela’s “Tohtori Finckelman” (Doctor Finckelman, 1952), Timo K. Mukka’s “Tabu” (The Taboo, 1965) and Maria Vaara’s “Likaiset legendat” (The Dirty Legends, 1974)—conceive them as bodily and embedded in the world, enacted in intercorporeal and intersubjective relations with other people and with the world, and entangled in socio-cultural norms and narratives that shape identity, gender, and sexuality. Furthermore, the novels emphasize the aesthetic and constructed nature of the fictional portrayals of shattering: the sense of experientiality evoked in the first-person narration is a carefully planned literary effect.

The analyses reveal how fictional stories can resist fixed cultural narratives of “normal” and “abnormal,” “natural” and “unnatural,” and “healthy” and “pathological” through their ambiguity and complexity. The discussed novels invite readers to ask aesthetic, ethical, and political questions about our views of psychiatric disabilities and persons suffering from them, and about the fictional portrayals and techniques of representation: How can we approach unusual and unsettling experiences without pathologizing or stigmatizing them? How can we honor the complexity of the experiences of others and cultivate an openness to difference?

The study participates in the work done in the field of critical medical humanities and offers a Nordic perspective to representations of mental illness in literary fiction. It contributes to the understanding of how fictional narratives evoke and convey experiences of illness and distress, the role of narrative empathy and aesthetic immersion in understanding unsettling experiences, and how narratives create understanding about the experiences of others. From a literary historical perspective, the study also sheds light on the ways the mind, consciousness and mental illness were discussed in Finnish literature throughout the twentieth century, and situates the Finnish modernist works in the international modernist tradition.

This chapter focuses on narratives of minds in crises - namely, in the midst of psychosis. The texts discussed not only evoke and convey experiences of mental distress to their readers, but they also reveal the way the human mind is constructed in a constant interaction between the body and the environment, and thus portray psychotic experiences as a part of normal experience and life - as something that can happen to anyone.

This article focuses on affects and emotions that are constructed and conveyed to readers in depression writing. How can fictional texts evoke the experiential world of depression? How are the often distressing and unsettling experiences of depression mediated through writing? Phenomenologists and theorists of embodied cognition have in recent years emphasized the interaffective, interpersonal and embodied nature of depression (cf. Fuchs 2013a, Ratcliffe 2015). In these views, depression is understood as a disorder of “intercorporeality and interaffectivity” and as “a ‘detunement’ of the resonant body that mediates our participation in a shared affective space” (Fuchs 2013a: 219). The aim of this text is to show how this new understanding can help us to see why depression writing is able to evoke such powerful corporeal and emotional responses in its readers, and also how depression writing may point to the embodied and interaffective nature of the human mind, thus opening up new possibilities for understanding experiences of mental illness.

On_Culture Issue 1 (Spring 2016), Emergence/Emergency, www.on-culture.org/journal/issue-1/sarah-kane-world-depression/

Fictional narratives of mental illnesses often focus on individual experiences of pain, anxiety and suffering. As such, narratives depict the experiences of illness in a holistic way, revealing the embodied, situated and intersubjective — in other words, emergent — nature of psychiatric disorders. They are thus able to create a different kind of understanding of mental disorders than medicalizing strands of psychiatry that tend to reduce mental illnesses to biological dysfunctions of the brain and the nervous system and thus ignore how disorders straddle the brain, the body and the environment.

In this article, I discuss how the experiential world of depression is constructed and conceived of in Sarah Kane’s play 4.48 Psychosis. Kane’s depiction of severe, psychotic depression is in line with phenomenological accounts of the illness, in which depression is understood as an emergent phenomenon that gives rise to alterations in the embodied being-in-the-world of the subject. The text refers to common cognitive-affective experiences and folk-psychological understandings of the mind and employs different intertextual, narrative and poetic strategies to convey the phenomenal world of depression to its readers. In addition, Kane emphasizes that to treat depression a deeper understanding of this ‘state of emergency’ is needed than what medicalizing psychiatry is able to provide.

Johdatus niin & näin -lehden teemanumeroon "Poliittiset tunteet" (4/2018):

Tunteilla tehdään politiikkaa. Valjastetaanko tunteet syventämään kahtiajakoja ja luomaan vihollisia – vai toimivatko tunteet kimmokkeena reflektiolle, vuoropuhelulle ja muutokselle?

Johdatus niin & näin -lehden teemanumeroon "Tiedostamaton, trauma & luovuus" (4/2019).

Tiedostamatonta voi hahmottaa ruumiillisena ja kulttuurisena kokemuksena, kehon, toiminnan ja havainnon rajoitteina, jotka määrittävät myös sitä, miten näemme itsemme ja toisemme. Kirjailija Roxane Gayn muistelmateoksessa Hunger – A Memoir of (My) Body (2017) paljastuvat ne ruumiilliset, tilalliset ja kulttuuriset sokeat pisteet, jotka muovaavat yksilön olemista maailmassa.

Fictional narratives of mental illnesses often focus on individual experiences of pain, anxiety and suffering. As such, narratives depict the experiences of illness in a holistic way, revealing the embodied, situated and intersubjective — in other words, emergent — nature of psychiatric disorders. They are thus able to create a different kind of understanding of mental disorders than medicalizing strands of psychiatry that tend to reduce mental illnesses to biological dysfunctions of the brain and the nervous system and thus ignore how disorders straddle the brain, the body and the environment. In this article, I discuss how the experiential world of depression is constructed and conceived of in Sarah Kane's play 4.48 Psychosis. Kane's depiction of severe, psychotic depression is in line with phenomenological accounts of the illness, in which depression is understood as an emergent phenomenon that gives rise to alterations in the embodied being-in-the-world of the subject. T...

Johdatus niin & näin -lehden teemanumeroon "Poliittiset tunteet" (4/2018): Tunteilla tehdään politiikkaa. Valjastetaanko tunteet syventämään kahtiajakoja ja luomaan vihollisia – vai toimivatko tunteet kimmokkeena reflektiolle, vuoropuhelulle ja muutokselle?

Lahilukeminen liitetaan yleensa etenkin 1940-luvulta lahtien vaikuttaneeseen amerikkalaiseen uuskriittiseen kirjallisuudentutkimuksen suuntaukseen. Taman kytkoksen vuoksi lahilukemista kuvataan usein lukemisen tapana, joka pyrkii mahdollisimman kriittiseen ja objektiiviseen kaunokirjallisen tekstin tulkintaan. Uuskritiikkia kuitenkin edelsi ja niiden rinnalla toimi joukko kirjallisuudentutkijoita ja -opettajia, jotka korostivat tarkan tekstianalyysin lisaksi myos lukemisen ruumiillisia ja poliittisia ulottuvuuksia ja vaikutuksia lukijoihin.Pohdimme tassa katsauksessa lahilukemisen ruumiillisia ja poliittisia ulottuvuuksia seka lahilukemisen kaytantojen sovellusmahdollisuuksia kirjallisuudentutkimuksessa ja sen ulkopuolella. Kartoitamme aluksi lahilukemisen vahemmalle huomiolle jaanytta historiaa, jossa lahilukemista hahmotetaan ennen kaikkea vuorovaikutuksena tekstin ja lukijan valilla. Tama ”vaihtoehtoinen” historia kulkee I. A. Richardsista ja Virginia Woolfista Louise Rosenblatti...

Anna Ovaskan väitöskirja Fictions of Madness: Shattering Minds and Worlds in Modernist Finnish Literature (”Fiktioita hulluudesta: Särkyneet mielet ja maailmat modernistisessa suomalaisessa kirjallisuudessa”) tarkastettiin 28.2.2020 Helsingin yliopiston humanistisessa tiedekunnassa yhteistyössä Justus Liebigin yliopiston (Giessen) kanssa.