Olli Jalonen’s Literary Explorations of Time, Space, and Existential Meaning

Abstract

ABSTRACT I argue in this article that five of the Finnish literary author Olli Jalonen’s post-1999 novels – Yhdeksän pyramidia (2000; Nine Pyramids), 14 solmua Greenwichiin (2008; 14 Knots to Greenwich), Karatolla (2012; A Winter Bonfire), Taivaanpallo (2018; The Celestial Sphere), and Merenpeitto (2019; The Surface of the Ocean) – are intellectually connected: forming an intertextual web, all these works explore the existential significance and mutual connectivity of spatiotemporality, impermanence, and subjective meaning-making. In elaborating on this argument, I take my primary theoretical cues from two sources. First, I draw on twentieth-century existentialism’s basic tenets that we humans are “time-haunted ani-mal[s],” due to our awareness of our own mortality, and that this predicament “demands that we actively make our destiny.” Second, in challenging the assumption that the spatial turn has rendered temporality an outdated interest in literary studies, I draw on the work of Adam Barrows, who argues, convincingly, that both time and space should be brought to bear on the study of fiction. As this article shows, the ways in which time and space intersect and intertwine in Jalonen’s narratives significantly contribute to his fictional representations of existential meaning-making.