A random memory, a pavement scene from the 1990s: the crowds wander anonymously by, but among them I make out a familiar face - a writer colleague, with whom I exchange a few hurried words in front of a department store.
The conversation has been wiped from my mind; only one significant comment is branded on to my memory: 'I believe that the time of the positive hero will yet return,' my colleague says, and glances at the people crowding into the store. Is that where the hero of our time would carry out his feats?
It is the deepest recession in Finland's economic history, and everyone is concerned only for their own credit ratings, the possibility of losing their jobs.
Does my colleague want a Zorro, or socialist realism, for literature, I wonder. The New Left intelligentsia, after all, was finally left homeless by the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Ten years later, I realise that my colleague was right. Songs of praise for heroes roll through the media as unstoppably as before the First World War.
Now, however, it is not war heroes who are praised; instead, the newspapers are filled with success stories from the new economy. A philosopher succeeds and makes till attendants into success stories on sell-out weekend courses. Brothers whose internet businesses have made them rich show off their brand new Lamborghinis in the evening papers.
Will the positive hero also make his return, according to the law of supply and demand, to literature?
One of the finest inventions of European literature was the antihero, who was unable to march in step. He tried his best: chewed the fat and pondered the death of God, made a fool of himself in the army or, in his office, anxiously pondered the meaning of life.
At the same time, modern, super-efficient weapons of destruction were being built in Europe, for the sake of which tens of millions of people lost their lives.
This would never have succeeded without the engineer and the positive hero.
If literature, too, cannot survive without a hero myth, what could our role model be like in the Finland of the 21st century, which teaches us to divide people - in the Anglo-Saxon manner - into winners and losers, and which worships power and health?
Perhaps our hero could be severely handicapped. He would slouch in his wheelchair, like the new writer Tuomas Alatalo, who was declared a simpleton at birth. According to the experts, he would never learn to communicate with other people. But he learned to read by observation, and made his story into a book.
Was it a success story for the 21st century, more powerful still than Nokia, even though its ending would not perhaps interest Hollywood as much as its beginning? For the end is laborious communication and learning self-expression. Just ordinary life, and letters on a computer screen.
Jyrki Kiiskinen
Editor-in-chief
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