Disasters and “destruktionsglädje”
In one of your earlier essays, you examined the short story “The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters” from the collection Tales of the Moomin Valley (1962), about a very anxious fillyjonk—one of the many species/characters populating the valley—who sees her fear of natural disasters coming true. When the Fillyjonk encounters the tornado, she thinks, “Oh, my beautiful, wonderful disaster.” After it has destroyed her home and taken her belongings, she reflects enthusiastically, “Now I’m free; now I can do anything.” For her, catastrophe is a liberating force. If we read the Tales just as Fillyjonk reads the world, we might assume that catastrophic events depicted in the story could have a similar effect on the reader: “I’m still reading; I’ve done it; I’m free; I got through the catastrophe”. Do the Moomins, who deal with a whole series of catastrophes—like the comet (Comet in Moominland, 1946), the flood (The Moomins and the Great Flood, 1945), the winter, way too much winter (Moominland Midwinter, 1957)—suggest a more liberating mode of reception and reading?
There’s always the possibility of reading metaphorically, or just thinking about natural catastrophes, which is exciting and something you might never experience. Isn’t it interesting to think about what would happen? In one of her essays Tove Jansson writes about “destruktionsglädje” (joy of destruction), about how a child’s sense of “destruktionsglädje” can be positive. You can imagine a huge wave, for example. She didn’t write about this in relation to war or our climate crisis, but rather to a very big rain or snowstorm where you can’t open the door anymore. You’d have to stay inside for a week. How exciting that would be! But it’s more like fantasy, a mere idea.
Jansson was interested in phenomena like great storms and ships on the waves, as well as comets. She probably experienced the threat of nuclear war as well. It is, of course, possible to read Jansson’s works in the context of man-made disasters. But I think it would be wrong to think only of war in relation to the first Moomin books.
Coming back to Fillyjonk and to the image of her leaning towards the storm: At first, the text is full of expressions like she runs into her pantry and hides, “she rolled herself into her quilt”, saying things like “I know everything will turn out badly”. But when the catastrophe comes, there’s this sudden liberation and a combination of two movements, of contraction and release. Jansson teaches us to also see the liberating side of things. If you manage to get through a snowstorm, for example, that’s a small catastrophe you’re experiencing, like Moomintroll in Moominland Midwinter (1957) when he’s really up against a snowstorm, but suddenly he realises he can turn around and just fly with it.
Dance as an interruptive force
You discussed the different roles that choreographed scenes play in Tove Jansson’s work, referencing the history of modern dance from Rudolf von Laban to Martha Graham. To some extent, the Moomin dance scenes serve a similar purpose to disasters in that they disrupt the progression of events simply by occurring unexpectedly. Could you perhaps say something about the ‘interactive’ force of dance and narration in relation to the ‘interactive’ force of nature depicted in Jansson’s books?
I think it is really like that. But dance as a force, as something that is actually happening, is difficult to put into words. It can change the direction of something, providing a sense of liberation and changing the mood.
In Jansson’s autobiographical short story “The Bays” (“Havsvikarna”, in Bildhuggarens dotter, 1968), she describes how, as a child, she used to walk from bay to bay in Pellinki, an archipelago not very far from Helsinki, at 4 o’clock in the morning. She goes to a bay full of reeds and touches them. They move and make all these sounds, and she becomes one of them. I think that’s beautiful. But I don’t know if you could compare that to a disaster that changes things. It’s a significant event to experience that kind of dance, a dance of nature, where you literally immerse yourself in nature and dance with it.
Dancing outside, and even detached from music, marks an important threshold in the history of modern dance (and has its fallacies as well), for example with Rudolf von Laban’s and Mary Wigman’s famous dance studies on the beach of the Lago Maggiore in the 1910s. I was curious about your mention of a certain change over time in Tove Jansson’s work in your lecture today. In the 1960s she tended to include in her books more improvisation in dance and less formalized styles like tango, samba, or else. Is there a correlation whereby the plot also changes towards a more diverse structure? You said that some critics felt there were too many narratives.
Two things are happening at the same time already in Jansson’s Moomin books. We can consider how the characters fit into the landscape. In the early books, they look at the landscape. It is framed. Landscape is described as something you gaze at or admire or are impressed by, or a setting for an adventure.
From around Moominland Midwinter (1957) onwards, the landscape and the movement of landscapes starts to go through the characters. They become something else. The Moomintroll needs to go low as the heather is growing, suddenly, a tree starts moving, the sand is escaping. One could refer to Shakespeare’s Macbeth or the cinema of Akira Kurosawa. It’s like the whole island is full of contractions and releases.
At the same time, in her writing and art, Jansson cuts out the details, avoiding too many adjectives and too many words in general, as well as too many colours. She makes everything more plain. In her visual art, there’s increasingly room for abstraction, although she only started creating non-figurative art in the late 1960s. All these things are connected. In almost every book, she challenged herself by using different techniques.
Murals and underwater paintings
When you introduced the mural Party in the City (1947) in your presentation, I had to laugh a little bit: If there is one thing that does not move and that is steady as something can be, it is a wall. Painting a dance scene onto a wall is quite a coup, I think. The materiality directly opposes the representation. Maybe you can let us know something about this tension between materiality and imagery in Jansson’s work. Also: Not everyone is dancing in this scene, right?
Yes, it’s her former lover, Vivica Bandler, a main protagonist of the Finnish avantgarde theatre in the 20th century, who’s dancing in the middleground. Jansson herself sits at a table in the foreground facing the viewer of the painting. In a song of hers, Jansson also writes about her dance and the colors, in particular about the ‘heaviest’ color, an intense carmine red. She adds this color to the painting because the relationship is coming to an end.
I think that’s a fascinating thought about making a wall dance. Many of her murals and public paintings depict dance, or movement at least.
She had also an enormous amount of flowers in those paintings, in general a lot of decorative elements. Even her underwater mural A story from the bottom of the sea (1952), painted for the city of Hamina, bursts with coloristic flora and fauna.
There were certain things that she had to include. She said that when she was creating these public paintings, she wanted to relax people, bring them joy, encourage them to interact with each other, and allow them to interpret the images in their own way. There are often narrative and funny elements. She loved all these small characters, for instance birds and dogs, or the Moomintroll, which appears in many of her paintings. And when you discover them, suddenly, they may be staring at you.
Global resonances
Outside of Scandinavia and Finland, in Poland and in the Baltic States, Tove Jansson is particularily well known as an author and painter; in Germany, some people are familiar with her work and some are not. Could you perhaps tell us a little more about this global reception history and the differing levels of popularity?
I don’t really know why this is the case. It seems to me that in countries like Poland the reception has been steady. This big interest in Tove Jansson has been there all the time, also in Lithuania, for instance. I’ve been giving papers in these countries and it seems like people really know Jansson’s art. Different age groups know her stories and know her.
In Japan, she’s been very beloved. When one of my books was translated to Japanese, I spoke to my translator and once asked “What do they think about the Moomins really?” She said that people in Japan know the Moomins, the characters and the shapes very well, but not so much the stories. Still, the absence of any dichotomies is understood very well. There is no good vs. bad. In Japanese literature, in folklore, and also in comic strips, take Naruto, for instance, dichotomies are often also undermined. It’s not like the characters can’t be or aren’t bad, but they can also have a good side. That was given to me as an answer.
It was a great surprise to me, when Sommarboken (1972) was republished in Britain in the early 2000s. There had been an interest in Jansson’s books and comics before, but then Summer Book suddenly started something in the English-speaking world that is still growing.
Another rumpus
Recently, I gave a seminar together with a colleague on the American illustrator Maurice Sendak: His work might make a great point of comparison. Many of the topics we discussed today are relevant to his work, too, including dance. In Where the Wild Things Are (1963), for example, there is the big rumpus dance. Has any work been done on this comparison?
Absolutely, I do refer to Maurice Sendak in my thesis. He also wrote about the relationship of literature with music in Caldecott & Co (1989). I found parallels with Jansson’s approach to dance. He wrote that music gives a rhythm to images; he used works like ‘quicken’ and ‘vivify’, which are applicable to Jansson as well. His book gave me confidence to write about this topic, too.
Thank you so much for this conversation!
