The
article analyzes Marko Tapio’s novel Arktinen
hysteria (1967–68) as a political text. With Jacques Rancière, I demarcate
the politics of literature itself from the ideological views of its author and
argue, against earlier interpretations, that Arktinen hysteria is a political book in this sense. The political
relevance of literature pertains to its ability to address the nature of the
political world and the limits of political community. Tapio’s novel takes an
actively anti-political stance, arguing that politics is unnecessary,
detrimental, and a form of legalized crime. While ostensibly condemning both
proletarian and bourgeois politics in the setting of the Finnish civil war, the
book, however, recurrently identifies “politics” with socialist politics – a
move reinforced by metaphorical assimilations with disease. Also Tapio’s
unpublished notes suggest that the novel makes its metapolitical claim against
the necessity of any politics from amidst political quarrel, thus amounting to
an eo ipso political work. I identify
three further political-theoretical arguments – pertaining to the questions of
mass politics and propaganda, order and chaos, and violence and speech,
respectively – and show how they are mediated by subtle symbolic interplay on the
level of text, particularly through the symbols of cracking dam, Hitler’s
photograph, and submachine gun.