Jäljistä spiraaliin. Raija Siekkisen lyhytproosatekstien muistimetaforat

Raija Siekkinen (1953-2004) was a Finnish author who wrote short stories and novelettes. Metaphors of the memory and remembering are quite common in her work. In Siekkinen’s short fiction, memory as such represents human autobiographical memory, while the remembering represents affective memory in the contemporary situation in the story. The personal and their lived life is the basis for the content of the memory and the remembering is created within the re-experiencing. Siekkinen’s fictive characters are actively and independently searching for the essence of memories as well as the reason for the remembering. For a reader, the narration offers metaphors of memory and remembering that represent tools for achieving understanding. In my article “From traces to a spiral. The metaphors of memory in Raija Siekkinen’s short fiction”, I reflect on the poetic metaphors of Raija Siekkinen’s prose texts by means of contemporary cultural conceptions of memory and remembering. I study the short fiction text as an active recorder of meanings. Several metaphors are analyzed; traces, codes, rings, marks, light, circles, spirals, chains, load and burden.