For the column of the lines of this week, Jon Allsop replaces Jay Caspian Kang.
If you were to go to my apartment, you would see a lot of moomins. My girlfriend and I have all kinds of trinkets bearing their resemblance: a selection of cups, a teapot, a tea towel (which we have framed and put on the wall), a bed night light, a pair of lighting keys, a collar, a wallet, a plastic model of a machine to sell in Japan, at least a Christmas decoration and a pair of free ones chimney. They look like heraldic bas-reliefs.
What are the Moomin, you may wonder. These are characters from children, dreamed of decades ago by the Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson, who are white and rotations, with sharp ears, swishy tails and rounded snout; They are sometimes compared to hippopotams, which is fair, even if the comparison does not particularly resonate with me. (For me, they look like moomins, a fact that is partly because I know them since my early childhood, but which is also a reflection of their singular visual identity; as Sheila Heti has it once in this magazine, they are “strangely familiar, as if Jansson was looking in a new direction and finding these tender and serious comrades, which were quite.” not I wonder what Moomin are – they have fans around the world, and my girlfriend and I are far from alone to have stuffed our house with their goods, whose world sales have exceeded eight hundred million dollars a year. (The cups of Moomin, each wrapped in a magnificent illustration, are the jewelry of this crown, and are very to collect; in 2021, an auction for almost thirty thousand dollars.) Other fans include actor Lily Collins, alias Emily of renowned “in Paris”, which not only collects the merchandise merchandise but named the episode and hosted the episode Introductive from another Podcast Moom.
On the podcast, Which Premièred in the Spring of 2023, Collins Said that, when Sher first Started Collecting Moomin Papernalia, It was “Impossible” to the Us this has changed in recent years: AlongSide The Podcast Launch, Moomin Characters (The Company that Jansson’s Creations) and Barnes & Noble Announced “A significant New Partnership to Make Jansson’s Literature Widely Accessible To American Audiences, Both in Stores and Online” (including, yes, a plan to sell cups); since then, there have been collaborations with Urban Outfitters and Luxury Labs, especially as Rei boys This year, which marks the ninety anniversary of the beginning of the Moomins, there were other signs of a Finnish invasion, including an exhibition in progress in the Brooklyn public library – the very first dedicated to Jansson in the United States – which reflects the progressive values of Jansson. As a political caricaturist, making fun of dictators; Linda E. Johnson, president and chief executive bib of Brooklyn, noted that Jansson was also openly queer, at a time when being gay was criminalized in Finland, and that the decision to highlight his work was timed to coincide with the month of pride. Culturally, “said Johnson,” and informs our audience: the Brooklyn public library does not retreat. “The exhibition is entitled” The door is still open “. (Earlier in the summer, a work of public art Moomin in London, produced in partnership with an initiative celebrating refugees, bore the same nickname.)
A framework of Moomin Characters told New York Times Recently, that the creations of Jansson “are discovered in the United States by new generations, spreading a word from one person to another”. Of course, a large part of this dissemination of words occurs on social networks. Moomin communities dedicated to Facebook and Tumblr for a long time. THE Times reported that generation Z intensifies the trend – posting the moomins on Tiktok, finding old animations on YouTube (which are closer to the drawings of Jansson than the more modern 3D offers) and, in the process, inaugurating the Moomins in “a world pantheon of kindness”. This kindness is, surely, a key engine of the online attraction of the Moomins, just like the feeling that the characters have an “wonderful inherent wonder” – as a writer recently said it after visiting the exhibition of Brooklyn – which offers an escape from the many anxieties of modern life. The association of Moomins with escape is not a new thing: Jansson wrote once she had created them when she “wanted to move away from my dark thoughts” and enter “an incredible world where everything was natural and benign – and possible”. When, in the years-40, a London newspaper who ordered a comic strip Moomin stipulated that there was no politics, sex or death, Jansson would have replied that she knew nothing of the government, that the Moomins cannot have anatomically sexual relations, and that she had once killed a hedgehog, but nothing else.
And yet, the books that Jansson has written on the Moomins contain, sometimes explicitly and other times by metaphor, political themes – war, displacement, imminent annihilation, environmental disaster – which are not used for distraction of the many dangers of the world, then or now. Earlier this year, the author Frances Wilson wrote, in a New statesman Essay on the “obscure side” of the Moomins, that “one of the strangest aspects of the Moomin phenomenon is the way in which these complex stories of apocalypse, rupture and disfunction were constantly ill -read as cute celebrations of domestic life.”
Time to box the cups, then? Not exactly. While some of the new online fans of the Moomins ignore anxiety – not to mention the strangeness – of the work of Jansson, I do not see any incompatibility between its cute illustrations and the existential fear that permeates their adventures. If anything, this juxtaposition makes the moomins perfect guides through our confused, online and extinguished moment. In the end, we could all spend usefully less time to take off and a little more time on scrolling.
Technically, it is not quite right to say that this year marks the eightieth anniversary of the beginning of the Moomins. Jansson first drew a creature similar to a moomin (with the intention of being ugly, not cute) when she was a child, sketching him on a wall of the outbuildings after a dispute with her brother on the merits of Immanuel Kant; Later, her uncle would warn her against the cupboards for a midnight snack, warning that, if she did it, the “moontrolls” who lived behind the stove would support their cold walls against her legs. At one point after Jansson began to contribute to satirical caricatures to BlurA Finnish magazine, she started drawing a character resembling a Moomin as part of her signature. In an illustration of cover, you can see looking behind the “M” of “Garm”. An Adolf Hitler caricature is perched on the “G.”
During the Winter War—Which Began when the Soviet Union Invaded Finland in November, 1939, and Would Go On Drive Hundres of Thousands of Finns from Their Homes – Jansson Started Work on What Would Become the First Moomin Book, Known Today As “The Moomins and the Great Flood” Though it wouldn’t be published until 1945. War Was the reality from which Jansson Would Later Say She Wanted to Escape, but as heti noted in her review of works on Jansson, the “big flood” is “fascinating for the way it does not seem inspired”. The book begins deeply in a forest, where a young character named Moomintroll and his mother are looking for “a warm and warm place where they could build a house to crawl when winter came”. Their subsequent adventures have a dreamlike quality, with each salvation (arising from a lemonade garden and candies, for example) quickly giving way to a fresh danger (vomit, in the case of candies). The most serious danger comes from the holder deluge, which pushes people at their home; It would be a preparterist to read this as a parable for the climate crisis, but it clearly resonates as such. And the illustrations have not yet faced the vibrant and rounded aesthetic which defines the Moomin Modern brand. The characters’ snouts are more pronounced. Tidy lines sometimes dissolve in dark ink washing.
The “big flood” has often been considered apart from the subsequent Moomin cannon: Jansson then described it as “banal history without any personality”; He was only translated into English in 2005, after his death. But similar themes cross the last books. “Comet in Moominland” (1946) can be read as an allegory of the fear of nuclear apocalypse (a resonance which must have escaped me when I read the novel as a child, realizing him until years later during a trip to an exhibition at the Moomin museum in the Finlandish city of Tampere). Wilson describes Moomin’s sixth book, “Moominland Midwinter”, containing “the most devastating account of depression in 20th century literature”, and notes that, in a subsequent comic strip, a psychiatrist puts Moomintroll on drugs that reduce him out of existence. The last of the novels of Moomin de Jansson, “Moominvalley in November”, sees the Moomin family disappear, and a variety of secondary characters reflect on their insane. Wilson and others compared him to “wait for Godot”.
This does not mean that Moomin’s books are depressing. Some of them have openly happy ends: the flood leads to a new house for the Moomin family; The comet is missing. And they are funny, capable of finding lightness in an imminent disaster. (When a character defines the word “disaster”, another thwarter that it is “in other words” fuss “.”) Overall, my permanent memory of books is that they are full of life, despite the complications of the world. “It would be horrible if the earth exploded,” said a different character in “Comet”. “It’s so beautiful.” This philosophy, I think, is what keeps the moomins in my heart (and my house). If the underlying themes can cause anxiety, then the Moomins themselves are anchor presence-everything that can happen to the world and whether we can control it or not.
