On the fear of looming disasters

Stories by Tove Jansson, Part 2 (“The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters”)

For the first part of this essay, please click here: Part 1 (“Tanten Som Hade en Idé”)

From Wikipedia, Tales of Moominvalley

“The Fillyjonk Who Believed in Disasters” in Tales From Moominvalley, by Tove Jansson, Sort Of Books, 2018, pp. 49-76.  Book originally published in 1962, translation from the Swedish by Thomas Warburton originally published in 1963.

To read in Swedish, look for it as "Filifjonkan som trodde på katastrofer" in Det osynliga barnet or listen to a recording online, e.g. on Spotify or Youtube.

What I love most about this sweet, funny little story, in addition to its exploration of formless, existential dread (more on that below), is how it illuminates the differences between outside behavior and overwhelming inner experience.

A Fillyjonk is a kind of creature in the Moomin universe. So far as I can tell, there is nothing to distinguish between a Fillyjonk and a human other than how they look, and the Filljonk in this story, like the tant in the previous story, is a single woman, though perhaps a bit younger: not especially old, but not especially young, either.

As with the tant, we meet her on her summer holiday, and have no idea what she does with her time the rest of the year. Unlike with the tant, however, Tove Jansson shows us this character’s inner life, and what a tumultuous life it is!

The story begins like this:

Once upon a time there was a Fillyjonk who was washing her large carpet in the sea. She rubbed it with soap and a brush up to the first blue stripe, and then she waited for a seventh wave to come and wash the soap away. ….

It was a mild and motionless summer day, exactly right for washing carpets. Slow and sleepy swells came rolling in to help her with the rinsing, and around her red cap a few bumble-bees were humming: they took her for a flower! (pp.49-50)

Everything about the scene is lovely. The carpet she’s washing is not the kind of thing that she’d have bought in a shop: it’s a “trasmatta”, a thin rug woven of leftover cloth that one places in hallways and other narrow places. Women used to make them as a part of normal household work. This one was probably woven by the Fillyjonk’s grandmother or mother, or even by the Fillyjonk herself.

When I mentioned this passage in the story to a friend in my small village — she is a writer and translator and musician as well as a neighbour, and had stopped by for warm coffee on a snowy day — her eyes got soft, and she spoke of washing her trasmattas in a lake, back when her children were small. “So wonderful,” she said, “to wash a trasmatta properly like that!" Hers had been made on a farm by the children’s grandmother, and are still in the family.

Trasmattas can be anything from boring to astoundingly beautiful. It’s not uncommon for people in my generation to have trasmattas made by their mothers or grandmothers, but they’re also just something that everyone has and that you buy in a department store or some such thing. In kitchens, the trasmatta by the sink is sometimes made of plastic, to make it easier to clean.

In the brilliant and funny classic Swedish novel Vem Älskar Yngve Frej? (Who Loves Yngve Frej?), published and set in the late 1960s, an older man who has lived on a farm his whole life, while also having a respected job as a shoemaker, realizes one day that he has had it. In that moment, he decides to take down his shingle: he “has done his,” and is now retired. His sister, who also lives on the farm, had humorously that morning referred to them and their home as an historical monument; now, in a fit of whimsey, he puts up a signpost to the farm with the words “Historical Monument” on it.

The sign starts to draw in passing summer tourists from Stockholm, and one of the funniest moments comes when a Stockholm group cannot imagine why the shoemaker and his sister are using plastic trasmattas when they own beautiful hand-woven ones. The shoemaker cannot imagine why the Stockholm group doesn’t understand that they keep a well-run house, and in a well-run house, rugs must be regularly washed, and washed properly. The plastic ones make it infinitely easier to do things properly.

In the end the Stockholmers buy the sister’s woven trasmattas for an enormous sum, leaving both sides happy and still finding the other incomprehensible.

So in Tove Jansson’s story the opening scene, to an outside viewer, is simply lovely, and beyond wholesome, a woman beside the sea enjoying the summer sunlight, washing a trasmatta out in nature as it ought to be washed.

Inside the Fillyjonk’s mind, however, life is more complicated.

The weather was far too fine, quite unnatural. Some disaster had to happen. She knew it. Out there below the horizon something black and terrible was lurking — growing larger, growing nearer, faster and faster… One doesn't even know what it is, the Fillyonk whispered to herself.

Her heart began to thump and her back felt cold, and she whirled around as if she had an enemy behind her. But the sea was glittering as before, the reflections danced over the floor in playful twists, and the faint summer wind comfortingly stroked her snout.

But it is far from easy to comfort a Fillyjonk who is stricken with panic and doesn't know why. With shaking paws she spread her carpet to dry, scrambled together her soap and brush and went rushing homewards to put the tea-kettle on the fire. Gaffsie had promised to drop in at five o’clock. (pp. 51-52)

Poster from a theatre production

By the time her guest is due to arrive, the Fillyjonk has calmed herself a bit through the process of setting everything out nicely for tea. She is heading towards the window to see if her guest — whom we somehow understand to be a woman of about the same age with a husband at home, maybe some grown children — is almost there when she veers off in case that should bring the anxiety pouring down on her again.

…[S]he thought hastily: “No, no. I won’t look for her. I’ll wait for her knock. Then I’ll run and answer the door, and we’ll both be terrible delighted and sociable and have a good chat… If I look for her perhaps the beach will be quite empty all the way to the lighthouse. Or I’ll see just a tiny little spot coming, and I don’t like to watch things that draw nearer and nearer…and still worse would it be, wouldn't it, if the little spot started to grow smaller and was going the other way…”

The Fillyjonk started to tremble. What’s come over me, she thought. I mustn't talk about this with Gaffsie. She’s really not the person I’d prefer to chat with at all, but then I don’t know anyone else hereabouts. (pp.55-56)

And then comes a wonderful set scene where we see the differences between what the Fillyonk is feeling, how she is acting, and how she is perceived.

There was a knock on the door. The Fillyjonk went rushing out into the hall and was already talking on her way to the door “…and what splendid weather,” she shouted, “and the sea, did you look at the sea…how blue today, how friendly it looks, not a ripple! How are you, well, you look really radiant, and so I thought you would…But it’s all this, of course, living like this, I mean, in the bosom of nature, and everything — it puts everything in order, doesn't it? (pp.55-56)

She’s more confused than usual, Gaffsie was thinking while she pulled off her gloves (because she was a real lady), and aloud she said: “Exactly. How right you are, Mrs. Fillyjonk.” (p.56)

In the Tant story, anyone who has found themselves in her situation might cringingly recognize some of the behavior as witnessed by the child: the urge to say thank you a little too often, the counterproductive attempts to not be in the way. I think that many people might similarly recognize the Fillyjonk’s behaviour in this story: the way she responds to anxiety by being wildly positive and other-focused: Everything is good, everything is great, let me say nice things to you and about you.

But eventually, and rather wonderfully, having tried to share her constant experience of the world as a merciless, threatening place (even if, as her friend ascertains, nothing so bad has happened as yet), she rejects how the friend is seeing her altogether.

Gaffsie is a jackass, she thought. A silly woman with cakes and pillow-slips all over her mind. And she doesn’t know a thing about flowers. And least of all about me. Now she’s sitting at home thinking that I haven’t experienced anything. I, who see the end of the world every day, and still I’m going on putting on my clothes, and taking them off again, and eating and washing up the dishes and receiving visits, just as if nothing ever happened! (p.66)

And now, on to how the story actually frames the Fillyonk’s life-filling anxiety and constant sense of impending disaster. It’s marvellous.

In a very few strokes, the story offers a great deal of detail about the nature of the Fillyjonk’s life, even if we don’t know what she does with herself when it’s not summertime. Above all, we know two things about her: first, that she has a strong sense of duty, and guides her actions almost always by reference to that. She chooses a house because she thinks that her grandmother once lived there, “[a]nd as the Fillyjonk was very attached to her relatives she at once decided that she would honour her grandmother’s memory by living there.” (p.52) When the house turns out not to be very nice, and furthermore never to have been lived in by her grandmother after all, she doesn’t break the lease because “by that time the Fillyjonk had written letters to all her relatives about her summerhouse, and so she didn't think it proper to change her plans.” (p.53) So she moves in with all of her lares and penates: photos and knickknacks and furniture that had belonged to various relatives, and washes her trasmattas properly and sets a proper tea tray and all such things.

The second thing we know about her is that she is, despite all of her deep sense of duty, essentially isolated. She is living alone in a house where she hardly knows anyone, and her understanding of duty is entirely outward-facing: it hardly seems to to occur to her that the world might have a duty back. She is disappointed and eventually angry when she tries to reach out to her only local friend, only to be left essentially on her own when the other woman refuses to engage, but beyond that we only see her doing what she thinks she ought to do, mostly for other people.

Her freedom comes when the disaster finally arrives. The shapeless, dreaded disaster becomes embodied as a literal storm. The ugly house and all of the objects that she had to take good care of because they had once belonged to relatives are destroyed beyond repair, and all of her self-imposed, almost formless duties have vanished.

In the calm after the storm she goes surfing on her trasmatta, the rare surviving object, on the still-wild sea.

One swell after the other came rolling over her, transparently green, and then the Fillyjonk came to the surface again, for a breath and to look at the sun, spluttering and laughing and shouting and dancing with her carpet in the surf.

Never in her life had she had such fun. (p.75)

Next: Part 3, “The Squirrel”

Photo by Önder Örtel on Unsplash

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For Part 1 of this essay, click here

For a little more on the “Fillyjonk” story, see The Radical Acceptance of Uncertainty II