PEKKA KYRÖ

Jussi Kylätasku -

Chronicler of crime and reconciliation

 

The writer Jussi Kylätasku (born 1943) originates in Tampere. In the best Tainean spirit, it is worth giving a brief description of the city of Tampere, the amazing stronghold of hard-hitting drama.

Tampere is, by Finnish standards, an old industrial city. It was founded around the middle of the 18th century on the bank of a river to meet the needs of industry. Subsequently, a large number of chimneys rose in Tampere. They no longer send their smoke out into the air; in other words, they do not belie the existence of heavy industry. The textile and metalwork factories of the centre of Tampere have become studios for information technology businesses and the media business, and a cauldron dominated by ethnic restaurants. Tampere was once known by the nickname, the Manchester of Finland, or ‘Manse’, in the local dialect. It is a sobriquet it still bears with pride.

The industrial environment, the industrial work which was on offer to both men and women, is, as an emotional and intellectual environment, easy-going and nourishes gender equality. Tampere people are uncomplicated, speak in loud voices and in a broad dialect which is at present popular in television entertainment and elsewhere. In a Tampere bus at rush hour one may hear two men conversing over the corridor: ‘Where is it you’re going?’ ‘I’m taking the old woman to the central hospital, her underneaths are playing her up.’

Tampere has traditionally been a good ice-hockey city – a decade or so ago, it was still Finland’s best. Characteristic of Tampere players is unusual sensitivity. The players of this aggressive contact sport are quiet, modest, humorous men who live in their own houses in the Tampere suburbs.

Tampere also has a strong literary tradition. Horny-handed working men write poetry. They have also written prose, the social epic of Tampere. In the history of Tampere, social ills were acute. During the Finnish civil war of 1918, the city was the stage for violent warfare as the Reds attempted to defend it against the attacking Whites, finally losing. During the Second World War, the communists of the workers’ city both participated in the war against the Soviet Union and were active in the resistance movement in their own home town. Much high-quality Tampere literature has resulted from these tensions. Finnish national literature. And these conflicts still lie within the citizens’ consciousness. Even though the social democrats and the political right have long since found each other in the governance of the city, and are happily married.

Kylätasku’s drama grows from strong soil

Tampere has never been a stage for the avant-garde or branded by some modernist phenomenon. Tampere realism is a concept that is known everywhere: basic reality, human characters who represent diverse social attitudes and opinions. Whoever does not fit in with this moves away from Tampere. But Tampere has produced an astonishing number of good writers. There is something strong in the soil.

Jussi Kylätasku is from Tampere; he attended the classical Realschule, and then moved away. In his writing, the Tampere foundation, with its capacity for caricature, its ‘loud-mouthed’ turns and masculine lyricism, is still influential. Even though he lives in the small town of Porvoo, whose great writer before Kylätasku was J.L. Runeberg, a poet and epic writer who wrote a heroic military history for Finland.

Kylätasku began in the 1960s as a modern poet. In the 1970s he shifted to novels, plays, radio plays and film scripts. He is of his age in the sense that many of his subjects are taken from the present day, particularly those of his novels and films. In his stage and radio plays, he likes to cloak his story in history, with examples from recent or ancient history. He writes about the present day by cleansing the history of today into clear oppositions. His history is either Finnish society awaiting a social, religious, moral or sexual explosion, or the Roman empire. He has written dramas which have knocked on the door of entire world views. Often knocked it to little pieces.

Kylätasku’s characters generally function in totalitarian systems, crime, religion. For him, a crime, the turning upside down of morality, and reconciliation, forgiveness, are among the modes of action with which he disciplines and orders his characters around. The history of crime is the history of this people, the small history of people. Of the social satire of the 1960s, Kylätasku retains the seeing of contemporary phenomena through the general and the private, with comedy. Although he is essentially serious and moral.

The crimes of history, as a criminal victim, extreme behaviour, power, sexual power, desire and its power, like a foaming rapid, are among the perspectives that Kylätasku offers his audience, and to the amazement of his audience. The individual as his own victim, his own demands fn ethics and simultaneous instinctive drive are Kylätasku at his wildest. These are visible as clearly in crime and in religious extremism, sexual predation and the capitalism of human relationships.

A whole, uncompromising world-view through his characters

Kylätasku himself has said that for him a crime is never the starting-point of a play. His starting-point is some human destiny, a crisis or equivalent. Kylätasku has said: ‘That which I have sought through roles may basically be that I have always liked to depict people with some internal, whole and uncompromising world-view. Which I envy them. I like to knock on it a little to see whether it can bear my amateur handling.’

Religious faith, a strong and uncompromising world-view in general, interests Kylätasku. Criminality and religiosity intertwine because generally reconciliation of crime also involves a religious reconciliation. Crime and religion are his materials, not his themes.

For Kylätasku’s generation, which grew up in the 1960s, these matters are familiar. Then, it was still possible to observe the puritanical and tormenting grip of religion, and crime which was linked to religion. Prison, in those days, was a central metaphor for the individual’s existential solitude.

Kylätasku’s most recently published work is the radio play Iivarin äärellä (‘Over Iivari’). In it, a wife, lover and a third woman who is also a lover, encounter a man, Iivari, on his death-bed. He has died in his lover’s bed in the midst of intercourse. For reasons of pure modesty and correctness, there is a move to take him home, to his wife’s bed, before the doctor and ambulance are called. This work, too, touches on crime, although the death is accidental: in the end, the third woman telephones the police and, slightly bending the truth, allows them to understand that the wife has killed Iivari. The radio play depicts the hopeless situation of the deceased: he can do nothing in face of the manipulation of which he finds himself the subject. He himself, in fact, has practised considerable manipulation of women. These feel a strange solidarity with each other, but also with Iivari. And the final straw is the third woman’s deceit. The radio play is a variation of the theme of deceit and unfaithfulness in the form of a grotesque farce.

Kylätasku is a master of dialogue. From the Brechtian tradition of the years of social radicalism, he has developed a good sense of situation and a skill in juxtaposing scenes. Kylätasku’s text is temperamental; it proceeds dynamically and finds in every scene a turning point which, in a surprising way, takes the characters and themes with it.

Jussi Kylätasku’s radio plays

Matti Väkevä first broadcast 1972
Hentomielinen Hilarius (‘Feeble-minded Hilarius’) 1974
Uuni (‘The oven’) 1979
Catalina 1980
Maaria Blomma 1980
Juna kulkee Keravalle (‘The train goes to Kerava’) 1982
Sinäkö, Brutus (‘Et tu, Brute’) 1982
Suudelmin suljetut kirjeet (‘Letters sealed with kisses’) 1985
Jörn Helveten balladi (‘The ballad of Jörn Helvete’) 1986
Jokamies (‘Everyman’) 1989
Laskevan auringon talo (‘The house of the setting sun’) 1992
Sulje silmäsi vain (‘Just close your eyes’) 1994
Keisari ja poika (‘The emperor and the boy’) 1994
Ranskalaiset korot (‘French heels’) 1995
Vuokra luonnossa (‘Rend in nature’) 1997
Tie Alkoon (‘The road to the off-licence’) 1997
Runar ja Kyllikki (‘Runar and Kyllikki’, radio adaptation) 1999
Iivarin äärellä (‘Over Iivari’) 2000