Põleva ihu sügis: märkmeid Jaan Oksa proosaluulest / Autumn of the Body on Fire: Notes on the Prose Poetry of Jaan Oks

Abstract

Teesid: Selles artiklis vaatlen uuesti Jaan Oksa kurikuulsat kolmeosalist proosaluuletust „Emased“, „Ihu“, ja „Nimetu Elajas“ (1908–1909). Tuginedes arhiiviallikatele, keskendun „meeleolu“ ja „maastiku“ (paysage) kujunemisele nii poeetiliste vormide kui kujundite tasandil. Väidan, et meeleolu kirjutamine väljendab rahvusluse küsimust, haarates kaasa Vene impeeriumi soolise ja seksuaalse kriisi. Maastik toimib ka ema(maa) ähvardava kujuna. Oks põimib seega oma eksperimentaalses loomingus dekadentsi rahvuslusega ning hilise keisririigi seksuaalkriisi pärandiga, kehastades hullumeelse geeniuse kuju väljasureva ja ohustatud „soo“ – maa-eestlaste – nimel.

This article reconsiders the prose poetry of Jaan Oks—“Females” (Emased), “Body-Flesh” (Ihu) and “The Nameless Beast” (Nimetu Elajas) (1908–09) which have been collated under the title “Breed-Sex” (Sugu) (2004). Drawing on postcolonial and gender studies, I argue that Oks was not only a rural, but also a “provincial” decadent, whose prose poems enacted the decay of the Estonian language and the crisis of race within the decline of the Russian empire. Oks performed the role of a mad genius to the dying, endangered “species” of rural, peasant Estonians. The prose-poems are centred around a symbolist essence of differentiation and the word for gender (sugu), translated as breed-sex, which I read as a conjunction of race and sexuality, subjugation and objectification as colonial subjects and “enfleshment” as serfs. In the prose-poetry’s auto-erotic descriptions, the spectres of a matriarchy repressed under oppressive Christian patriarchies return as the motherly “Females” to engulf the narrator as a viraginous, fatally feminine nature.

Drawing on the analytic language of prior analyses (Luks 2024; Haljak 2024) I argue that Oks’s heretical metaphysics, with its dualistic poles of masculine and feminine, was informed by the colonial history of modernizing Estonia. This analysis follows the thinking of Amber Musser, Heather McClintock, and other post-colonial scholars who address how racialized regulations of gender and sexuality constitute social relations: Oks’s transgressions of sexuality express racial formation and the regulations of nationalism. Though Baltic Germans affected the enculturation of Estonians, and serfdom was ended in 1816 in the Governorate of Estonia, class differences between peasants and elite remained enormous, especially in Saaremaa. In the prose-poems, Oks describes the “flesh” (ihu) of this ethnically charged difference exacerbated by Russian imperialism and cultural aggression.

In the second part of this essay, I argue that the genre of “mood” (meele-olu) figures at two levels in the prose-poems: first within the text—following Schopenhauer’s philosophy—as elliptical descriptions of cyclical desire. Secondly, “moods” operate as the text itself, and represent the author’s attempt to revive Estonian literature through decadence and the prose poem. This second innovation follows Taine’s theory of art, according to which any work of art conveys the inherited “temperament” of a race. Similar to Yeats in his 1903 essay, “The Autumn of the Body” and his attempts to forge an “aristocratic esoteric Irish literature,” for both noble and low-class person, Oks linguistically innovated the Estonian language (Dowling 1986, 247–8). As I demonstrate through his criticism, Oks had not lost the revolutionary fervour of 1905 but rather taken on the self-sacrificial challenge of the “folk” or the incipient Estonian nation. In order to do so, his poetics underwent the “decay of literature,” following the organic metaphor which late Victorians gave nations and languages in their cycles of growth and decay (Dowling 1986, 46).

In the third part, I address the intersection of sex and race in the prose-poem’s poetics of landscape or paysage. I read the aggressive masculinity of Oks’ processual narrator and his preoccupation with the maternal function as expressions of racialized oppression. The third text “Nimetu Elajas” (1.7.1909) Oks labelled with the French term for landscape, paysage, a testament to the recurrence of rural milieu and the countryside throughout the cycle. I refer to the “mother(land)scape” as the description of landscape and mood by way of masochistic sensations of “female” submission. The motifs of domestic animals, livestock and the autumnal countryside repeat themselves within “mother(land)scapes.” The boundary between the body and landscape depended on the “mood” of present experience, which included the pornographic gaze and the affects of racialized difference, both threats to the homogenous ‘nation’ of the Russian empire and symptoms of a degenerate breed (Hearne 2021, 216).

In the final section, I turn to the third part of the cycle, “The Nameless Beast,” and further philosophical interpretations. Oks’s prose-poetry represents desiring-production as a pornographic transgression, what I call “porno-theology,” while his metaphysics may also be compared with Indian and Buddhist cosmological descriptions of the madness of the afflictions, disturbances in the mind of all living beings. In contrast to a Christian metaphysics, I follow the Schopenhauerian influence and suggest that the affective labour of the moods also can be read as the practice of viewing all beings as mothers in potentially infinite cycles of rebirth. Read as a compassionate act, the ecstatic self-immolation of the author-narrator becomes an autumn of the body on fire.