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Johanna Sinisalo: The Core of the Sun
Sep. 9th, 2018 03:20 pmJohanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun is a strange dystopia, presenting a Finland in which government control over all facets of life has brought about both the monstrous - a rigid eugenics program that aims to produce virile, masterful men and bubble-headed submissive women - and the bizarre - a ban on anything consumable that offers a strong sensory experience, from tobacco and alcohol to chili peppers.
The narrator, Vanna, is an aberrant woman - she looks like, and can pass as, an eloi, one of the pretty, incurious, domestically and sexually focused women who are preferred as wives, consorts, and sex workers. But her mind is that of a morlock - she is intelligent, curious, restless. The novel is partly epistolatory, in that much of Vanna’s account of events is told in the form of letters to her missing sister Manna, a true eloi. The letters talk to Manna about Vanna’s present, but also about their shared past, giving the reader insight into how Finnish society was transformed into the world in which
Vanna lives.
As Vanna remembers their upbringing, how both sisters were taught the rigid sex roles demanded of the eloi, we learn how Vanna has managed to reach adulthood undetected. The sisters were homeschooled by their grandmother, who lived in a rural area, free from the degree of observation they would have faced in a city, or even a town. Aulikki, who came of age before the adoption of the eugenics program, realised that Vanna was too intelligent to be an eloi, but physically able to pass as one. She carefully taught Vanna to hide her differences, to seem to be like Manna.
Vanna and Manna’s relationship, once close, is eventually damaged by Manna’s eloi conditioning and responses. Their grandmother had hired Jare, a young man from the city as a hired hand to help out on the farm. Jare accidentally discovered Vanna’s secret, but was willing to keep quiet; this shared secret, and the isolation in which they lived, resulted in something unthinkable to an eloi - a friendship. Manna became jealous, competitive for Jare’s affections as elois are conditioned to do, and resented what she saw as the love affair between Jare and Vanna. When the two girls come of age and move to the city, to enter the marriage market - quite literally - Vanna and Jare become partners in an illegal enterprise, dealing in chiles, the pretense of a relationship an ideal cover for their partnership. Manna, still wounded, quickly becomes engaged.
As the narrative progresses, alternating betwen Vanna’s letters to her sister, Jare’s recollections and thoughts, and excerpts from documents detailing this alternative history of Finland, and the nature of the social expectations of men and women - mascos and minuses, eloi and morlocks - we learn the story behind Manns’s disappearance, and follow Vanna’s desperate search for the truth.
The novel is not just a picture of secret resistance to an oppressive, rigidly gendered and controlled society, however. It is also an examination of loss, addiction and mental illness. Vanna is a capsaicin addict. She craves the heat of chilis, seeking anything with a high scoville rating, the higher the better. Her addiction helps her to control what she calls the Cellar, a space within her mind, a metaphor for anxiety, depression, panic. A place where she can feel as though she’s trapped, with water rising all around her. A depression caused by Vanna’s sense that it is her fault that Manna is missing, presumed dead - though Vanna cannot bring herself to think it.
In the second half of the book, Jare and Vanna become involved with the Gaians, a religious cult that seeks to breed the purest, most potent possible chili, believing capsaicin in its natural form to be a spiritual awakening agent, that the effects of capsaicin on the brain can induce trance experiences - it’s their quest for this plant, which they call the Core of the Sun, that gives the novel its title. Jare and Vanna move back to the country, to the farm where Vanna grew up, inviting the Gaians to come with them and, under the cover of growing hyper-organic vegetables, complete their breeding program to produce the Core of the .sun. Meanwhile, they produce lesser breeds of chili, which Vanna and Jare sell, using the funds to support the group, and to save money for Jare’s goal, which is to defect from Finland and make a life for himself in the outside world. The parallels between the breeding of the plants, and the eugenics-based breeding program that has produced eloi and morlocks, in which only the offspring with the desired characteristics are allowed to breed, raise serious ethical questions - which in some ways, Sinisalo leaves hanging - about when and where selective breeding, attempts to improve a species, are legitimate. If breeding chilis to a point unknown in nature is a spiritual quest, but breeding humans to create a subrace of infantilised women a horror, where does the dividing line lie? In some ways, the fire of the chilis is also a metaphor fir the fire of resistance - the Gaians reject the social order in Finland, and at one point, Vanna, in a capsaicin-induced trace, sees the power of her visions as powers that can also bring down the repressive system. I must admit, as a devote of the chili myself, I was rather taken with the idea of chili peppers as the path to enlightenment and social justice. If only it were so.
The way the novel is structured gives Sinisalo the freedom to make many trenchant comments on the social construction of gender and other stereotypes. At one point, talking about television programming for elois, Vanna says:
“I sat with you and watched one television show after another that ended in marriage. “Elois” flouncing around in beautiful gowns, heavily made up, wigs on their heads, padded in the right places. They couldn’t use real elois—that would have been a real job, would have required memorizing lines, concentration, perseverance. The mascos dressed as elois on the TV shows tittered and giggled and fluttered and swung their hips and stuck out their lips and used an exaggerated caricature to show how an eloi should look and sound. I had read in one of Aulikki’s books that in old American movies, white people painted their skin black to portray Negroes. I wonder if some dark-skinned people who watched those movies thought that they were supposed to speak in simple sentences and roll their eyes and be childish and superstitious.”
I couldn’t help thinking, as I read the passages about the establishment of this rigidly gendered society, of other feminist works that have imagined a ‘return’ to an imagined natural or God-prescribed order where all men are powerful and all women submissive. And of what’s happening now in the US, and other parts of the world, as hard won freedoms for women and other marginalised people are being swept away by people with an ideology of repression and control. Once I thought it would be difficult for such things to happen, once a momentum was established. Now I’m terrified by hiw easy it seems.
Books like this have become vital warnings, to resist before it’s too late.
The narrator, Vanna, is an aberrant woman - she looks like, and can pass as, an eloi, one of the pretty, incurious, domestically and sexually focused women who are preferred as wives, consorts, and sex workers. But her mind is that of a morlock - she is intelligent, curious, restless. The novel is partly epistolatory, in that much of Vanna’s account of events is told in the form of letters to her missing sister Manna, a true eloi. The letters talk to Manna about Vanna’s present, but also about their shared past, giving the reader insight into how Finnish society was transformed into the world in which
Vanna lives.
As Vanna remembers their upbringing, how both sisters were taught the rigid sex roles demanded of the eloi, we learn how Vanna has managed to reach adulthood undetected. The sisters were homeschooled by their grandmother, who lived in a rural area, free from the degree of observation they would have faced in a city, or even a town. Aulikki, who came of age before the adoption of the eugenics program, realised that Vanna was too intelligent to be an eloi, but physically able to pass as one. She carefully taught Vanna to hide her differences, to seem to be like Manna.
Vanna and Manna’s relationship, once close, is eventually damaged by Manna’s eloi conditioning and responses. Their grandmother had hired Jare, a young man from the city as a hired hand to help out on the farm. Jare accidentally discovered Vanna’s secret, but was willing to keep quiet; this shared secret, and the isolation in which they lived, resulted in something unthinkable to an eloi - a friendship. Manna became jealous, competitive for Jare’s affections as elois are conditioned to do, and resented what she saw as the love affair between Jare and Vanna. When the two girls come of age and move to the city, to enter the marriage market - quite literally - Vanna and Jare become partners in an illegal enterprise, dealing in chiles, the pretense of a relationship an ideal cover for their partnership. Manna, still wounded, quickly becomes engaged.
As the narrative progresses, alternating betwen Vanna’s letters to her sister, Jare’s recollections and thoughts, and excerpts from documents detailing this alternative history of Finland, and the nature of the social expectations of men and women - mascos and minuses, eloi and morlocks - we learn the story behind Manns’s disappearance, and follow Vanna’s desperate search for the truth.
The novel is not just a picture of secret resistance to an oppressive, rigidly gendered and controlled society, however. It is also an examination of loss, addiction and mental illness. Vanna is a capsaicin addict. She craves the heat of chilis, seeking anything with a high scoville rating, the higher the better. Her addiction helps her to control what she calls the Cellar, a space within her mind, a metaphor for anxiety, depression, panic. A place where she can feel as though she’s trapped, with water rising all around her. A depression caused by Vanna’s sense that it is her fault that Manna is missing, presumed dead - though Vanna cannot bring herself to think it.
In the second half of the book, Jare and Vanna become involved with the Gaians, a religious cult that seeks to breed the purest, most potent possible chili, believing capsaicin in its natural form to be a spiritual awakening agent, that the effects of capsaicin on the brain can induce trance experiences - it’s their quest for this plant, which they call the Core of the Sun, that gives the novel its title. Jare and Vanna move back to the country, to the farm where Vanna grew up, inviting the Gaians to come with them and, under the cover of growing hyper-organic vegetables, complete their breeding program to produce the Core of the .sun. Meanwhile, they produce lesser breeds of chili, which Vanna and Jare sell, using the funds to support the group, and to save money for Jare’s goal, which is to defect from Finland and make a life for himself in the outside world. The parallels between the breeding of the plants, and the eugenics-based breeding program that has produced eloi and morlocks, in which only the offspring with the desired characteristics are allowed to breed, raise serious ethical questions - which in some ways, Sinisalo leaves hanging - about when and where selective breeding, attempts to improve a species, are legitimate. If breeding chilis to a point unknown in nature is a spiritual quest, but breeding humans to create a subrace of infantilised women a horror, where does the dividing line lie? In some ways, the fire of the chilis is also a metaphor fir the fire of resistance - the Gaians reject the social order in Finland, and at one point, Vanna, in a capsaicin-induced trace, sees the power of her visions as powers that can also bring down the repressive system. I must admit, as a devote of the chili myself, I was rather taken with the idea of chili peppers as the path to enlightenment and social justice. If only it were so.
The way the novel is structured gives Sinisalo the freedom to make many trenchant comments on the social construction of gender and other stereotypes. At one point, talking about television programming for elois, Vanna says:
“I sat with you and watched one television show after another that ended in marriage. “Elois” flouncing around in beautiful gowns, heavily made up, wigs on their heads, padded in the right places. They couldn’t use real elois—that would have been a real job, would have required memorizing lines, concentration, perseverance. The mascos dressed as elois on the TV shows tittered and giggled and fluttered and swung their hips and stuck out their lips and used an exaggerated caricature to show how an eloi should look and sound. I had read in one of Aulikki’s books that in old American movies, white people painted their skin black to portray Negroes. I wonder if some dark-skinned people who watched those movies thought that they were supposed to speak in simple sentences and roll their eyes and be childish and superstitious.”
I couldn’t help thinking, as I read the passages about the establishment of this rigidly gendered society, of other feminist works that have imagined a ‘return’ to an imagined natural or God-prescribed order where all men are powerful and all women submissive. And of what’s happening now in the US, and other parts of the world, as hard won freedoms for women and other marginalised people are being swept away by people with an ideology of repression and control. Once I thought it would be difficult for such things to happen, once a momentum was established. Now I’m terrified by hiw easy it seems.
Books like this have become vital warnings, to resist before it’s too late.
