Page - 41 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 4/2018

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 4 2o18 Tuulikki Kurki | Border Crossing Trauma 41 Border crossing experiences can vary from the ordinary to the traumatic, and are a highly topical theme in today’s world as they represent the everyday lives of millions of people. The recent International Migration Report provided by UN, shows that 258 million people have left their homes more or less permanently (United Nations 2017, 4). The reasons for migrat- ing are various, and migrants include people who are forced to migrate because of war, nature catastrophes, persecution, or severe threat of violence. However, migrants also include people who are mobile in their everyday life because of work, leisure, or family circumstances. This article studies two novels written by Arvi Perttu: Pain (Kipu 2014) and Symposium of Petrozavodsk (Petroskoin symposiumi: 2001). These novels address traumatic experiences that relate to territorial and symbolic borders and border crossings of Finnish migrants in the Finnish-Russian borderlands. In Perttu’s novels, the traumatic experiences are seen as the results of violence, death and profound changes in the lives of individuals due to border crossings, and are of such magnitude that they cause an “incomparable amount of suffering” so that it is im- possible for the individual to “comprehend the experience or to integrate it in the individual’s understanding of the world” (Schweiger 2015, 346). In Perttu’s novels, the territorial border refers to the national border between Finland and Russia that has been the source and context of several significantly traumatic events throughout history. Symbolic borders refer to various borders emerging in encounters between people, in social and cultural practices, and in differ- ent discourses (Johnson et al. 2011, 63). The analysis focuses on narratives and metaphors in Perttu’s novels that are representative of border and mobility related traumatic experiences. The research questions are: What do the representations of trauma, that are often grotesque1 and surreal2 in Perttu’s works, force readers to see (see Caruth 2008)? How can the hyper-naturalist3 and grotesque prose that can be used to label Perttu’s gloomy and dark works, as well as his surreal forms of narration function as a form of trauma language (Caruth 2011)? Literature, poetry and art can function as instruments for communicating border and mo- bility related experiences in more multifaceted ways than the use of everyday language. They can also deepen or enrich our understanding about such experiences. The significance of poetic and artistic representations is that they “can provide moral, political, and aesthetic ways of un- derstanding” and these understandings are never seen as “simple, flat, and formulaic” (Winn 2008, 7). Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests that we can “rediscover the perceived world with the help of modern art and philosophy” (Baldwin 2004, 10). Through artistic representations, we can distance ourselves from our everyday observations and experiences, and study them from different and even surprising viewpoints. As a result, when represented through art, the world 1 Grotesque refers here to ridiculous, bizarre, extravagant, freakish and unnatural; aberrations from the desirable norms of harmony, balance and proportion (Cuddon 1999, p. 367–368). Sometimes grotesque is used in con- nection with ‘carnevalistic’ and ‘magic realism’. In literature and art, grotesque is often used as an instrument of societal and cultural criticism 2 Surrealists in art and literature have been interested in expressing the workings of the unconscious mind, in studying dreams and hallucinations, and the threshold of the conscious mind. (Cuddon 1999, p. 882–883.) 3 According to literature researcher Mark Lipovetsky, hyper-naturalist prose was a new version of realism in Rus- sian literature that was introduced in the culture of Perestroika. Typical motifs of hyper-naturalist prose were “everyday cruelty, crimes, tortures, and humiliations of recruits in army, the horror of prisons and other peniten- tiaries, the ordinary life of homeless derelicts and prostitutes.” These motifs “typically evoked anger and moral indignation among the critics and readers.” (Lipovetsky 2011, p. 179.)