When Pentti Holappa won the Finlandia Prize with his novel of homosexual love, Ystävän muotokuva ('Portrait of a friend', see page 70), many expected an invigorating literary scandal. In Ystävän muotokuva, set mainly in the 1950s, Holappa unceremoniously describes what crippled war heroes got up to among themselves in their bedrooms.
Unexpectedly, a scandal arrived: in his acceptance speech, Holappa did not thank the giver of the prize, but attacked the literary criticism of Helsingin Sanomat - Finland's biggest newspaper. Many disaffected writers and even the odd publisher joined the ranks of the rebellion, for the paper's influence as a former of opinion has grown to a status that is unique even in global terms.
Six days later, the debate in the pages of Helsingin Sanomat ended.
The rebellious writers shifted the debate to the Internet - under the title Sanoma-open - where it has continued energetically for the past four months.
What sort of a problem, then, is the influence of Helsingin Sanomat? Undoubtedly it causes grey hairs, perhaps also to the arts editors themselves. The paper's circulation is so large - more than 475,000 in a country whose total population is only five million - that it is not possible to express opinions on its pages at all, as opinion becomes, in the minds of readers, an official pronouncement.
Who, then, can write as themselves for a paper that dominates public opinion in such a way?
Are malice and arrogance on the part of reviewers the real problem of the arts pages, as many of the debaters claim? I think not, even if uncalled-for malice and power politics do perhaps appear.
The problem lies in the traditional form of criticism, which has, in today's media environment, become an uninteresting form of writing. Column-inches shrink, works are assessed like brands of shampoo, and they cannot be set in a wider context, in a more essayistic style. On the basis of newspaper criticism, the reader does not gain new, interesting insights, but participates like a spectator in a writers' beauty contest.
The conclusion is that literature is boring, so that one may just as well watch the television.
Another problem is, of course, capitalism. If the influence of Helsingin Sanomat continues, we may only hope that there are within the management of the company enlightened capitalists who understand the importance of competition and seek competitors for themselves, either outside the company or within it.
In his acceptance speech, Pentti Holappa proposed that Helsingin Sanomat's literary supplement should be developed in a more open direction and that it should become an independent, widely distributed literary magazine that would stimulate Finland's literary debate as well as the newspaper's own arts editors.
In such a way, the literary supplement could become Helsingin Sanomat's own dear enemy.
Jyrki Kiiskinen
Editor-in-chief
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