Reshaping Finnish Working-Class Prose: Hannu Salama's Siinä näkijä missä tekijä as a Postrealistic Novel

This article surveys Hannu Salama's contribution to the reshaping of working-class literature in the 1960s and 1970s. The main focus is on Salama's novel Siinä näkijä missä tekijä (Where there's a crime, there's a witness,1972), a pioneering work of Finnish postrealism. Postrealism reshapes both the themes and the narrative structure of traditional realism. With the help of several character-narrators, the novel breaks down the autocracy of the omniscient narrator, often held to be the ideological voice of a grand narrative; in Finnish literature, this is usually a bourgeois rather than a working-class one. In Siinä näkijä missä tekijä, ordinary workers describe their experience in the communist resistance movement during the Second World War in Finland. They also comment on the political context of the late 1960s. In the 1970s, Salama's novel raised polemics, but today it is regarded as one of the most innovative classics in all Finnish literature.