"Why am I telling you this story?" ["Miksi kerron tämän tarinan sinulle?"] Thus begins Mariaana Jäntti's 1986 novel, Amorfiaana, in which Jäntti uses magical realism and narrative techniques to probe the ontologies of textual and physical bodies. Since the novel's release, Jäntti has been compared to Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, Walter Kilpi, Virginia Woolf, and Hélène Cixous. As the list demonstrates, Jäntti's style impresses readers, but proves hard to place. Philip Landon describes Amorfiaana as the most radically experimental work in the Finnish language (34). I will show how Jäntti's narrative transcends reality's boundaries with magical realism and the boundaries of consciousness with its amorphous array of narrative styles to explore the constantly changing ontologies of subject formation.

Amorfiaana's characters are united by their presence in one building and by the fact that the narrative rarely leaves the building. Jäntti organizes the text into chapters designated with locative headers like "cellar," "kitchen, hallway, and room," and "room." Readers voyeuristically watch as a miscellaneous conglomeration of events unfolds in the building, including legal proceedings, seedy sexual encounters, illness, decay, meals, domestic squabbles, and housework. Jäntti taunts readers with sketchy details about the fatal tricycle accident that frames the rest of the book's events, forcing readers to rubberneck, trying to see what really happens. Jäntti draws readers in with hints of unspecified secrets, perhaps incest, abortion or child abuse, but never resolves whether they are true or false or partially true. Her readers are left in a state of confusion, wondering how the characters are related, who is telling the story, what is actually happening.

At the time this was written, Jäntti's answer to the nouveau roman had inspired two full-length articles, focusing largely on the text's relationship to theory, particularly Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and Cixous. Kristina Malmio interprets the novel's characters as representations of body parts, bodily functions and psychological circumstances and the tricycle accident as a metaphor for female authorship. Anna Makkonen, on the other hand, devotes more attention to the novel's form, classifying it as poststructuralist, a cross between an artist's self-portrait and a female bildungsroman. Makkonen also analyzes recurrent themes including the Daedalus myth, gender rolls, and numerical and maternal images. In common with Malmio and Makkonen, my analysis of the text looks at its stylistic devices and treatment of physical bodies, but takes a somewhat different turn. I focus on Amorfiaana's narrative mode, particularly the incorporation of magical realism and postmodernist techniques, and its exploration of the nature of the posthuman body.

Publicly, Jäntti has said little about the text, insisting that it should speak for itself. She enjoys confused boundaries, permanently partial identities, and contradictory standpoints (Interview 36-7). Comfortable with the idea of miscegenation--well aware, as she says, of the Jewish, Spanish, Swedish, German, and Finnish blood running through her veins--Jäntti requires her readers to embrace it as well (Interview 36). She calls Amorfiaana a context, explaining that being in Amorfiaana means testing boundaries (Interview 37).

That is precisely what I will do here: demonstrate how Jäntti tests these various boundaries in Amorfiaana. She plumbs the boundaries of reality by using all five of the primary characteristics Faris suggests for magical realism (167). Jäntti tests ontological boundaries by foregrounding postmodernist literary devices. She tests narrative boundaries by creating a text that amorphously combines numerous narrative perspectives and modes of presenting figural consciousness, transitioning unannounced from one to another. Finally, in all of these ways, she tests the boundaries of what it means to have a human body, testing the boundaries of the posthuman subject...