Portrait of the author: Leena Krohn, watercolour by Marjatta Hanhijoki (1998, WSOY)

In many of Leena Krohn’s books metamorphosis and paradox are central. In this article she takes a look at her own history of reading and writing, which to her are ‘the most human of metamorphoses’. Her first book, Vihreä vallankumous (‘The green revolution’, 1970), was for children; what, if anything, makes writing for children different from writing for adults?

Extracts from an essay published in Luovuuden lähteillä. Lasten- ja nuortenkirjailijat kertovat (‘At the sources of creativity. Writings by authors of books for children and young people’, edited by Päivi Heikkilä-Halttunen; The Finnish Institute for Children’s Literature & BTJ Kustannus, 2010)

What is writing? What is reading? I can still remember clearly the moment when, at the age of five, I saw signs become meanings. I had just woken up and taken down a book my mother had left on top of the chest of drawers, having read to us from it the previous day. It was Pilvihepo (‘The cloud-horse’) by Edith Unnerstad. I opened the book and as my eyes travelled along the lines, I understood what I saw. It was a second awakening, a moment of sudden realisation. I count that morning as one of the most significant of my life.

Learning to read lights up books. The dumb begin to speak. The dead come to life. The black letters look the same as they did before, and yet the change is thrilling. Reading and writing are among the most human of metamorphoses.

Soon after that morning, I opened another book, a collection of poems by Saima Harmaja. My mother used to recite to us a few lines from one of the poems, ‘Nuori enkeli’ (‘The young angel’), by way of an evening prayer. But she had never read aloud the stanza that I now read. It is engraved on my memory: ‘How hard was the journey, how bewildered the brain / As one the world spoke, in the language of pain’. I felt I understood what was meant by those words, though at that point I had seen so little.

The third important book of my early childhood was my sister Inari’s first-year reading book, which also taught basic arithmetic. There was a short story in it about a girl who was given six cherries, delicacies I myself had never laid eyes on. The girl was supposed to share the cherries with her sister, but she claimed she had been given only four cherries. She gave two to her sister, and ate up four herself.

To me, this was like a thriller or a horror story. As a five-year-old who had learnt to share everything equally with my sister, I had never read of a more appalling crime. I began to see that there was a difference between right and wrong and that a person needed to learn what the difference was if she wanted to avoid suffering a great deal, and causing others to suffer.

Reading was the most important thing in my life when I was at school. I would never have called it a hobby, though; it was something much greater and more important than that. Going to school was secondary, and that showed in my marks; I was always a poor student, right up until sixth form. A musical child knows early on that she’s in training for her future career, but I had no idea. I wasn’t in training to be a writer; I read for the sheer pleasure of it. Of course, I later understood that it’s only through reading that you learn how to write. And I didn’t feel the need to talk about what I’d read to anyone else; books were too private for that. It is with books, and not people, that I spent the most pleasurable moments of my life.

Around the time I was learning to read, we were given Zacharias Topelius’s Lukemisia lapsille (‘Reader for children’) in a deluxe edition illustrated by Finnish and Swedish artists. I was still reading it when I was at my single-sex secondary school in Helsinki, along with the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen is still one of my great role models. It is often said that children need happy endings. Just last summer, I reread Andersen and realised how amazingly often his stories end unhappily, at least in the conventional sense. Children die in them, and so do lovers, and the one who loves the most stays behind, alone. And still the stories provoke hope and insight.

Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, which I was given as a seven-year-old, is still among the books that are most dear to me. Many of the scenes in the book will stay in my mind forever. Some of them are fast-paced and funny, like the japes and scrapes of the conceited Toad. Others possess the pure magic of poetry. For example, the scene in which Mole feels homesick. His abandoned former home sends him a message, which he obeys. There’s also the Water Rat’s wanderlust, the lure of the unknown South, and the words of the wayfaring rat: ‘I will linger, and look back; and at last I will surely see you coming, eager and light-hearted, with all the South in your face!’

In his work, Grahame captures the sacredness of experience and the spirit of nature. This places his work in a higher and nobler class of children’s literature – and world literature.

I don’t see a clear difference between writing for children and writing for adults. It’s just that when I write for children, I’m writing for everyone; when I write for adults, I’m only writing for some people. In everything I write, I try to be ‘brief, clear, and rich’, to quote Andersen. The question ‘What is true?’ is fundamental to my life.

During the morning devotions at school, we would often sing: ‘Spirit of truth, guide us’. And in our reading book, we were our told: ‘Child, shun lies, always tell the truth. Always tell the truth, in play and in earnest’. At the beginning of the 20th century, the realists thought you should only write what is true. How can a writer who writes mainly fantasy, or something called sci-fi, abide by such instructions? In my view, it’s not impossible. Art is a game and a lie, but as such, it approaches truth. That’s the paradox of art.

Literary fiction couldn’t exist without imagination or rational thought. In my opinion, the imagination is the basis of all rationality. It is also the basis of conscience. A person needs to be able to imagine the consequences of her actions both for herself and others. Art or literature cannot, then, be separated from moral choices.

Reality, and above all the human world, is made up of impossible connections. Fiction and reality exist in a symbiotic relationship. What could be clearer proof of this than money, which once again has recently betrayed its unstable, ghostly, and fictional nature? It’s quicksand, and something even more deceptive. I’ve termed such phenomena tribars, after the impossible objects devised by the physicist Roger Penrose. A tribar is an image of human reality, which brings together truth and untruth, symbol and matter, rationality and irrationality, to form a construction that is logically impossible.

My books do not exactly take place at a certain time or in a certain place. Like Angelus Silesius, I believe that you are not in a place; rather, the place is in you. I don’t see myself as writing national literature, nor have I ever dreamt of writing the great contemporary novel. I have always wanted to write short books that nonetheless have the spirit of truth in them. National literature was at one time necessary to create a spirit of togetherness for a new state, and a collective symbolism, but I believe that it has had its day. It is sometimes said that all good literature is political. Maybe so, but then good literature is also always cosmopolitan.

It cannot be denied, however, that place shapes people in powerful ways, since memories are of course anchored in place and time. Place, time, and language are the foundations of identity. Of necessity, a writer draws on her own life experiences when writing, even if they are not obviously apparent in her books. All of one’s personal history, all of one’s life experience – and that includes what one has read – are there in the writing. You don’t have to go and write about things you haven’t personally had contact with – but I use ‘personally’ in a very wide sense. Still, writing is for me a forgetting of the self – the individual abandoning herself to the greater sum of things. In writing you go back and forth between private and public zones. You can only relate the most private things publicly, and in a common language.

I think of world literature as both shared and indivisible. Children’s literature is also world literature. All literature involves sharing and reciprocity, giving and receiving gifts. All works, whether they are written for children or adults, in whatever language and country, form one and same world literature, in which all works exist in relation to each other. Completely autonomous works don’t exist, and every book has many authors, both dead and alive. Literature is intellectual capital that is not used up or diminished through distribution.

The first obligation of the writer is to write as well as possible. In fact, thinking about it, that is the writer’s only obligation.

Translated by Emily Jeremiah

Leena Krohn on the way to Cape Tainaron, Southern Peloponnese, Greece; this is where Europe ends. Her novel entitled Tainaron appeared in 1985. – Photo: Mikael Böök (2008)

The world wide web, whose services most of us now use for work or entertainment, is a greater invention than we have, perhaps, realised up till now: according to the writer Leena Krohn, it is nothing less than an evolutionary leap

Technology combats the limitations of our senses, geography, and time. The human eye can’t compete with the visual acuity of an eagle, or even a cat, but with the best telescopes it can see into the early history of the universe, with new electron microscopes it can distinguish individual atoms.

The human senses nevertheless have an unbelievably broad bandwidth. About a million times more data flows to our brains by means of our senses than we could ever grasp consciously. Instead, the consciousness of (even us) humans is meagre – as well it should be, since human mental health would collapse if its system were overloaded, if all of a person’s perceptions could pass into consciousness.

The construction of consciousness is more a process of discarding than of accumulation. But the most remarkable aspect of human consciousness is that a person can choose the focus of their attention, and also quickly shift it. Consciousness is an endless process of elimination, a process of choosing. The human mind searches and chooses meanings as a bumblebee does honey: meanings are the food of consciousness.

The information network, the world wide web, is such a notable revolution in telecommunications that it can be considered an evolutionary leap. The information network is also a network of individual consciousnesses, and the significance of the internet is one of a sharing of meanings, much like that in literature.

Within the information network, a person is an inhabitant of both the physical and the digital world. He or she is like an astronaut floating weightlessly in space, out of contact with anything material. For the astronaut, expressions like ‘above’ or ‘below’ lose their meanings, and to the traveller in the information network – the internaut – things both near and far can be ‘here’.

But the reader of a book also lives in two worlds simultaneously: his or her own reality and the reality created by the writer. Both the information network and the literature of the world (every single book) are cosmoses of the mind, albeit very different ones.

Familiarising myself with the internet in the early 1990s clarified a certain reality that should have been otherwise apparent, but simply hadn’t been. Literature is not books. (Neither are all books literature.) The covers of books, their numbered pages, or the black print do not make up literature. Literature consists of aggregates of meanings called works. The meanings are common to all humanity, but the way that they are chosen, combined, and collected into works is extraordinary and unique.

In the 21st century, the internet has moved into a new phase, and this shift also affects literature. No one really thinks, any more, that the net can change literature in such a revolutionary way as was imagined only a decade ago.

New genres such as graphic novels and interactive juxtapositional poetry have not taken the place of reading or buying Gutenberg-type books. Automated story-generating systems have not been able to hold our interest for long. Readers haven’t rushed in bucket brigades to contribute to non-linear niche-fiction begun by ‘real’ writers. They would rather write themselves, and that is a good thing.

The most linear of all literary genres, the diary, is more popular than ever before. What self-respecting person with writing ability who possesses a computer doesn’t maintain at least one blog nowadays? Encyclopedias as well, of which Wikipedia is the most significant, have also migrated to the internet.

There is now talk of a phenomenon known as cloud computing. It is likely that before long the work done on a computer will, like leisure-time computer activities, happen in ‘clouds’. Work will be completed and recorded in the hovering digital cloud that circles the globe by means of trouble-free online applications. There will be no need to buy separate word-processing, spreadsheet, layout, or presentation software for our own computers – instead we can use free software such as Zoho Writer, Buzzword, AjaxWrite, ThinkFree, Writely, or gOffice….

From anywhere in the world, on any computer, writers will be able to retrieve and continue their work on a document and share it with anyone they choose to. And every visitor to the internet’s social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, its marketplaces like InnoCentive, its Semantic Web applications like Twine, and its virtual worlds like Second Life, are also made to practise written culture.

The greatest change from the point of view of literature, however, is the digitisation of text, because apparently the literature of the world is moving to the internet in the very near future, whether that is universally accepted or not.

Project Gutenberg began the digitisation of books as early as 1971, Project Runeberg (which focuses on Nordic literature) in 1992. Their written content was not originally scanned – individuals typed it up and uploaded it from their own computers. The Million Book Project from 2001–2007 digitised 1.4 million mostly non-English-language works from China, India, and Egypt. Online bookseller Amazon now offers a million electronic documents (eDocs) and along with it the Kindle reading device which was recently brought to market has sold well, bolstering faith in the future of the e-book. My guess is that mobile phones will replace the Kindle as a reading device. (I confess I have read both non-fiction and fiction from my mobile phone on sleepless nights for several years now.)

But none of these projects can compare to Google’s ambitious goals. In Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organise Everything We Know, Randall Stross sees the Google BookSearch program as a project comparable to the first missions to the moon. Google’s specific goal is to digitise 32 million books from 25 thousand libraries.

Copyright questions are a problem even for Google, however. At the moment, readers can access approximately 7 million works in their entirety. According to a recent contract with publishers and authors, readers (at first only in the United States) will soon be able to choose from a much wider selection, including copyright-protected out-of-print books that Google has not yet been able to digitise.

As Andrew Keen asked in the Independent, ‘Is Google good or bad?’. Keen answered the question himself. ‘Google is, in fact, an Orwell-Disney co-production. The company wants to know everything about us so that it can help us in every way. Room 101 [Orwell’s chamber of horrors] then, on planet Google, is a brightly lit, cheerful place where we can, at the click of a mouse, know all there is to know about ourselves, our neighbours and the world.’

Google’s goal is a stunning one: an organisation begun as a search engine is aiming not just for the digitisation the world’s literature and its meanings, stamped with its own watermark, but for the organisation of all information. Is any firm fit for such a task?

Reaching the point of so-called ‘technological singularity’ – a complete shift to a new era, in which artificial intelligence reaches and surpasses human intelligence – is an event that has long been anticipated, and feared. Such a moment is not yet in sight. But as data streams expand and combine with one another, are we approaching an ‘information singularity’, a phase in which meanings begin to disappear into the cold, white noise of information?

At that point, the web will have grown into a universal library so immense that even the most advanced search engine robots will be lost in its labyrinths, like the visitor to the infinite library imagined by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (written in 1941, it depicts a universal library containing not just all existing, but also all possible works, including texts consisting entirely of arbitrary strings of characters). In order to find a specific work in a library as comprehensive as this, a robot would have to be fed the entire text, word by word!

Translated by Lola Rogers