Encyclopedia for life writing: three articles

Three articles on life stories

      Encyclopedia of life writing. Autobiographical and Biographical Forms
      Margaretta Jolly (editor)
      Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, London, Chicago 2001

1. Kalle Päätalo, 687-688
2. Finland: a survey of life writing, 325
3. Sociology and life writing , 818-820

1. Kalle Päätalo

     Kalle Päätalo (1919-) is a Finnish author, who has perhaps
     written the most extensive best-selling autobiography in the
     world. His epos consists of 26 volumes, over 10 000 pages, that have
     been published between 1971 and 1998 and have sold over 100 000
     copies per volume.
   Päätalo was born in a very small farm in Taivalkoski, in the Northern
   Finland. He worked as a forest worker until the outbreak of the war,
   during which he served altogether five years in the army. After the
   war, Päätalo moved to the city of Tampere, working as a construction
   worker and studying to become a building master. After finishing his
   studies he worked in the trade and published his first novel,
   Builders, in 1958. It was a success and after the second book Päätalo
   became a full-time writer. He wrote a few novels about his youth
   experiences, but then decided to embark on a full autobiography,
   supposed to comprise 3-4 volumes. This project was then transformed into an
   enterprise which lasted for 27 years.
The first five volumes cover the childhood and youth of Päätalo,
the next five cover the war years, and the following 15 volumes give us
the time until the publication of the first and successful novel. The
last volume treats the years after this and until the present. In 1999,
Päätalo will celebrate his 80th birthday, in weak health (he has
suffered from a heart condition since the 1960's), but with a
publication of a collection of short stories and a play, and an
anthology written in his honour.
     The autobiography is written from a continuous first person
     perspective but with a person gallery comprising well over 2000
     people. It is an extremely detailed description over the everyday
     life of a Finnish man who is born into poverty, experiences years of
     real hardship, starts work very early and becomes an extremely
     conscientious worker, is a shy and closed youth whom the war
     provides with an opportunity for sexual adventures (described in a
     honest if not very graphic manner), is injured in the first fights
     of the war, then serves behind the front as a prison camp guard, and
     is released only after the end of the war in 1945. He marries, moves
     to Tampere, lives very frugally, starts studying and begins to build
     his own house (in which Päätalo still lives), participates in the
     post-war construction boom in Finland, and embarks on his first
     novel.

Päätalo's literary interest was awakened well before the war by a
teacher who let the young boy read lots of books, notably Jack
London. In addition to London another early example was Mika Waltari,
the author of Sinuhe, who also wrote a short book about how to
become a writer, which Kalle especially took to heart. The book is
finished and Päätalo sends it to the publishers, one of which takes
notice and after extensive rewriting (by Päätalo,in the midst of leading
the construction of a large factory building) publishes it, to an instant success.
It is estimated that the books of Päätalo have since sold
over three million copies, in a country of five million population.
    The popularity of Päätalo did not endear them with the literary
    establishment. Their literary value has been considered nil and
    Päätalo had to wait a long time for recognition. But since the late
    1980s even the Finnish intellectuals have started to see the value of
   Päätalo's work, especially as life writing has become increasingly
    popular and so-called ordinary people's autobiographies have become
    an object of both general and scientific interest. Still, there are
    almost no translations of the autobiographical series. One translated
    book by Päätalo was reviewed in Times Literary Supplement with the
    comment, "even the sex act had to described with the opening of every
    trouser button separately", i.e., the story was a little slow .
It is thus probable but unfortunate that Päätalo's fame will remain limited to
his native country. The reason why his autobiographical series has
become popular in Finland lies in the very naturalistic, honest and
open description of a man, whose good an bad qualities are the same
as everybody else's albeit somewhat more extreme: in his capacity of
work, sexual appetite, honesty and conscientiousness, shyness and
difficulty of expressing himself, traumas of poverty and bad treatment,
and gradual social ascent, Päätalo exemplifies the Finnish
man of the 20th century up to and including the baby boomers.

Further reading:

www.taivalkoski.fi/paatalo-instituutti/english.htm (The home page of the
Päätalo institute in English)
Tero Liukkonen (ed): Päätalon juurella. Juhlakirja 11.11.1999. Gummerus,
Jyväskylä 1999 (the 80th anniversary book dedicated to Kalle Päätalo)
Vesa Karonen: Juuret Iijoen törmässä - missä latva. 1999 plenary
lecture in the annual Päätalo conference)
Panu Rajala: Kalle Päätalon suuri rakennelma. 1996 plenary lecture in
the annual Päätalo conference)
J.P.Roos: But is this an autobiography? (in Liukkonen, ed) 1999

2. Finland: Survey of Life Writing

     Finland is a small country with a population of only five million.
     It became independent in 1917, after a century of Russian rule and,
     before that, some 600 years of Swedish rule. The most recent
     archaeological excavations reveal that Finland has been inhabited
     already 200 000 years ago. Yet the Finnish language became a written
     language only in the 16th century and the first novels were
     published in the 19th century, after the publication of the Finnish
     national epic, Kalevala. This famous epic, based on a collection of
     oral poems from the Eastern regions of Finland, tells about mythical
     characters with quite down-to-earth Finnish qualities. The lives of
     these heroes were extensively described in the Kalevala and can thus
     be said to represent the beginning of the life writing in Finland.
     Especially the tragic life story of Kullervo, combining Herculian
     strength and Oidipean fatal attraction, and that of the strong and
     suffering mother of Lemminkäinen, who resurrects her son back to
     life, are basic ingredients in the self representations of Finnish
     men and women.

    As in all literature, Finnish literature has a very strong streak of
    autobiographical elements. There are many authors whose production is
    based on a very thinly veiled autobiography. Some of the best known
    works of Finnish literature are highly (auto)biographical and epic:
    Toivo Pekkanen's In the Shadow of the Factory, Pentti Haanpää's The
    Field and the Barracks, and Väinö Linna's Unknown Soldier and Under the
    Polar Star. As these titles suggest, all these books describe
    events that have formed Finnish national identity, especially the
    rapid industrialisation and the war experiences. Another type of
    autobiographical novels peer behind the barrier of happiness of the
    bourgeoisie, such as Helvi Hämäläinen's A decent tragedy
(whose diaries have been an important literary event of the 90's)

    In the Swedish-speking minority, which
    represents about six per cent of the population, life writing has
    been even especially pronounced and openly autobiographical texts
    abound, from Anders Ramsay's From years of childhood to silver hair
     to Henrik Tikkanen's autobiographical series, Märta
    Tikkanen's, Jörn Donner's and Christer Kihlman's and Tove Jansson's
    autobiographically based texts. Professor Merete Mazzarella has both
    published analyses of Swedish language autobiographical novels and
    her own memoirs. We should not forget the world-famous
    Moomin series by Tove Jansson, where the volume called "The memoirs
    of Papa Moomin" kindly parodies the whole memoir tradition starting from Rousseau..
(she has of course written several autobiographical novels herself).
Biography and memoirs of famous people have been and remain popular
genre in Finland: among the most ambitious examples there are
Tawastjernas Life of Sibelius, Th Rein's classic the Life of Snellman,
Mannerheim's memoirs. Lately, President Urho Kekkonen (19-1975) has had
a five volume biography dedicated to his life, and President Paasikivi
one almost as extensive. This is of course not anything uniquely
Finnish: the only exception is probably that the Finns are also
eager authors of published or unpublished autobiographies. There is a
strong undercurrent of unpublished life writing: many more
autobiographies are written than published. This has been obvious when
publishers have organized special collections of new autobiographies,
and when researchers have sent out calls for life stories. The earliest
such competition dates from the beginning of this century and the one
organised in the 60's gave rise to long series of published popular
autobiographies, as well as a valuable arhive of unpublished manuscripts
in the archives of the Finnish Literature Society. Thus there is already
a long row of publications dedicated to life stories of ordinary people.
They are mostly anthologies, but there is also a flourishing research
tradition based on them (see Life stories in sociology). So far, Finnish
biographical literature has been relatively free of the current
Angloamerican fashion concerning intimate details, scandalous revelations of sexual
or political nature, etc. However, during the 1990s there have been some
signs of such a development. The childhood memoirs by the daughter of
the politician Ahti Karjalainen and the president's wife Tellervo
Koivisto, or the autobiographically based novels of Tuula-Leena Varis
and Anja Kauranen, deal with alchoholism or mental illness. These are
all works which have helped overcome the social taboos of
Finnish society. But so far, the fashion "to reveal everything" in a
scandal-seeking manner has not spread in Finland.

FURTHER READINGS

J.P. Roos: Suomalainen elämä (Finnish life) 1986
Merete Mazzarella: Att skriva sin värld (To write one’s world) Söderströms, Helsingfors 1993
Finland: A cultural encyclopedia. Finnish Literature Society 1997
A History of Finland's Literature (History of Scandinavian Literatures, Vol 4)
George C. Schoolfield (Editor) University of Nebraska Press 1998
Henrik Tikkanen
Märta Tikkanen

3. Sociology and life writing

"We are safe in saying that personal life records, as complete as
possible, constitute the perfect type of sociological material",
claimed W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki famously in the classic
text of life writing, Polish Peasant in Europe and America. This
claim, made in 1918, has since then been both absolutely believed and absolutely disbelieved. These beliefs and disbeliefs are theoretically deeply variable,
depending on both methodological and theoretical assumptions.

   One basic distinction can be made between the life course
approach, which is mainly statistical, and the life history approach,
which works with personal narratives.   Only the latter kind of
life writing will be considered here. The best-known representatives of the former are Glen H Elder and Martin Kohli.
Life history belongs to the qualitative and phenomenological end of the
sociological ontology. It is not, however, necessarily 'soft' or
microhistorical. On the contrary, life history research feeds on the
tension between the realist and the constructionist approaches. The first
has been interested in great historical processes such as social
mobility, generations and the experiences of social classes and
professions, while the second tends to focus on the presentations of
ideals, identities and narrative configurations.
        The 'story' of how life writing has developed in sociology
can be summarized as follows: first the life stories were taken as
facts (to be checked), then they were given a narrative dimension,
and ultimately they were approached as contextually bound
constructions, indistinguishable from fiction. In the late 1990s, the
fashion was again turning towards a more realist approach, mainly as a backlash against the overly post-modernist and textual interpretations where the baby gets lost with the bathwater. But the discussion about narratives, texts and reality will continue.
    It is obvious that such wildly diverging interpretations imply completely different
uses of life stories. The methods of treating such materials also
differ, ranging from analysing experiences in a chronological historical
context to line by line or even word by word analyses based on discourse
or conversational analysis. There are several different types of life
writing: in depth life story interviews, autobiographies, diaries and
letters. Diaries and letters will not be considered here, except by
noting that both have had some, but limited, sociological use, the most
famous being the letter collections in the Polish Peasant. However, the
interest in diaries is clearly growing, based on the example of Philippe
Lejeune. Life stories are recorded by the researcher in a method
similar to that used in oral history. Studies of autobiographies can use
either published texts, or material sollicited by the sociologist
through autobiographical competitions. Both kinds of life writing
material can be either general or thematical in nature - thematical life
writing focussing e.g. on a certain profession or illnesses, or on
certain social practices, such as sports, sexuality or experiences of
art. The most famous sociological uses of life writing material have
been, in addition to the already mentioned study of Polish peasants,
Clifford Shaw’s Jack Roller (a study of a young thief) and Oscar Lewis’ Children of Sanchez, which marked the beginning of a more textual approach to life stories, and gave new life to life stories after a long period of dinterest. The first “downfall” of life stories can be dated to the end of the thirties when the case study approach in general fell into disrepute, because of the development of new kinds of directed questionnaires, attitude scaling etc. Decisive was a famous meeting of the American Academy of Sciences where ?Polish Peasant was re-evaluated by Herbert Blumer and Samuel Stouffer, who came to the conclusion that the new methods were much more efficient and reliable and that life histories could be discarded as inefficient and old-fashioned.
   It took a long time before this view changed. It was slowly understood that, although questionnaires and scales and multivariate methods were very efficient, they also lost lots of information in the process and that the basic information was not always very valid or reliable. So they did not answer very well to new questions related to understanding and explanation of human agency. Also the question a a longer perspective cannot be answered very well with the help of ordinary survey research.
The French sociologist Daniel Bertaux was a key figure in the revival of
sociological life story research in the 1970s and 1980s. His case study
of the baker profession in France is a minor (still unpublished!) classic and the anthology Biography and Society remains a landmark for the field. Bertaux also
developed the method of family case studies, which has been applied in
Russian social history. Autobiographies have been especially popular in the Nordic countries. They have been used to analyse social mobility and generations ( Bertaux, Thompson, Roos), class and national identities (Gullestad), gender and sexuality (Stanley, Laslett), .

While literary autobiographies increasingly document for the unique and highly
personal, sociological life writing is used to capture the essence of
nations or generations. One enduring theme has been women's and men's
narrative styles, known as the debate about autonomy vs relational
selves. One fascinating subgenre of life writing is represented by the
researcher's own autobiographical analysis. Carol Steedman (1985) used
her family memoirs for a critical discussion of prevailing theories
about class and gender identity. Liz Stanley did the same in her essays,
coining the term auto/biography. Among the most recent trends in
sociological life writing is the combination of 'hard' and 'soft'
methods. The sociological study of life stories needs statistical and
historical contextualisation, while representative population surveys
are often supplemented with some in depth interviews or an
autobiographical competition (Rotkirch, Haavio-Mannila). In fact, a major breakthrough of the biographical wrtinig is the realization that without context, there can be no understanding of the life story and that the “discovery” (some prefer the word construction) is the essential task in all sociological analysis of life writing.