Modernity, Meteorology and Magic: Mediating Weather with Johanna Sinisalo’s The Storm Flute

Radvile Musteikyte

doi:10.59045/nalans.2026.103

Authors

Radvile Musteikyte Vilnius University and University of Turku Author https://orcid.org/0009-0002-3351-1993

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.59045/nalans.2026.103

Keywords:

Johanna Sinisalo, Weather, Modern attitude to nature, Anthropocene, Econarratology

Abstract

This article examines The Storm Flute (2021), an eco-magical realist novel by Finnish author Johanna Sinisalo. Aiming to analyze how the novel addresses the question of technological weather modification in a way that encapsulates and criticizes the modern attitude to the natural world, the article contextualizes the novel’s plot development within the sociopolitical dynamics of control characteristic of modernity. The protagonist’s preoccupation with meteorology invites a discussion of how humans make sense of weather phenomena through scientific methodologies, in contrast to literary means. Noting Sinisalo’s use of a single magical element that predicates numinosity to weather phenomena, this econarratological reading contends that the novel argues against harmful anthropocentrism, prompting engagement with the natural world beyond the nature–culture binary. This article adds to the understanding of the tendencies of Sinisalo’s poetics, participating in broader discussions regarding the ways in which contemporary fiction can engage with the Anthropocene not as an abstract concept but as a lived reality.

Author Biography

Radvile Musteikyte, Vilnius University and University of Turku

Radvilė Musteikytė is a doctoral researcher at Vilnius University (Lithuania) and the University of Turku (Finland). Her project concerns literary strategies employed in contemporary narratives to introduce environmental concerns and advocate for a different attitude towards the natural world. She analyses Finnish speculative fiction from the perspectives of the rhetorical theory of narrative and econarratology. Radvilė’s research interests include contemporary Finnish literature, Anthropocene fiction, ecocritical and posthumanist literary studies. She is a keen reader of cli-fi and the head organizer of Lituanicon – Lithuania’s annual convention for all fans of the fantastic.

References

Attebery, B. (2024). Affordances of Fantasy. Genre, 57(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10982852

Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822391623

Brawley, C. (2014). Nature and the Numinous in Mythopoeic Fantasy Literature. McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Caracciolo, M. (2021). Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene. University of Virginia Press.

Caracciolo, M. (2026). Econarratology and the Anthropocene. In Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene (pp. 1–6). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51703-7_103-1

Caracciolo, M., & Ulstein, G. (2022). The Weird and the Meta in Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts. Configurations, 30(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0000

Ghosh, A. (2017). The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (First published in Allen Lane by Penguin Books India 2016). The University of Chicago Press.

Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Polity press.

Gutauskas, M. (2019). What is “The End of Nature”?: Modernity and Ambivalent Heterotopias. Filosofia, (64), 41–56. https://doi.org/10.13135/2704-8195/4058

Gutauskas, M. (2024). Anthropocentrism and Two Phenomenological Approaches to Animal Life. Problemos, 105, 45–62. https://doi.org/10.15388/Problemos.2024.105.4

Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology. In The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (pp. 3–35). Garland Pub.

Heise, U. K. (2008). Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195335637.001.0001

Hepach, M. G., & Lüder, C. (2023). Sensing Weather and Climate: Phenomenological and Ethnographic Approaches. Environment and Planning F, 2(3), 350–368. https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825231163144

Husserl, E. (1984). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (D. Carr, Trans.; 6th pr). Northwestern Univ. Press.

Ingold, T. (2005). The Eye of the Storm: Visual Perception and the Weather. Visual Studies, 20(2), 97–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/14725860500243953

Ingold, T. (2015). The Life of Lines. Routledge.

Iovino, S., & Oppermann, S. (Eds.). (2014). Material Ecocriticism. Indiana University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt16gzq85

Irr, C. (2018). Review: Contemporary Ecocriticsm and the Weather. Contemporary Literature, 59(2), 261–273.

Jackson, M. (2002). The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity. Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen ; Distributor USA & Canada, International Specialized Book Services.

James, E. (2015). The Storyworld Accord: Econarratology and Postcolonial Narratives. University of Nebraska Press.

Jylkka, K. (2021). Invasive Humans and Posthumanist Horror in Johanna Sinisalo’s Birdbrain. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 28(4), 1254–1268. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa083

Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity.

Lehtimäki, M. (2024). Daily Life and Global Crisis: Human Experience and Narrative Fiction in the Age of the Anthropocene. In H. Duffy & K. Leppänen (Eds.), Storying the Ecocatastrophe: Contemporary Narratives About the Environmental Collapse (pp. 25–44). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

McKibben, B. (2006). The End of Nature (First published in Random House 1989). Random House Trade Paperbacks.

Moore, J. W. (2017). The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of our Ecological Crisis. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44(3), 594–630. https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036

Neimanis, A., & Walker, R. L. (2014). “Weathering”: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality. Hypatia, 29(3), 558–575. https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12064

Raipola, J., & Lahtinen, T. (2020). Colonized Environments: The Weird Ecology of Johanna Sinisalo’s BirdBrain. In S. Isomaa, J. Korpua, & J. Teittinen (Eds.), New Perspectives on Dystopian Fiction in Literature and Other Media (pp. 227–242). Cambridge Scholars Publisher.

Ricœur, P. (2009). Time and Narrative. Vol. 1 (K. McLaughlin, Trans.; Repr, Vol. 1). Univ. of Chicago Press.

Rigby, C. E. (2004). Earth, World, Text: On the (Im)possibility of Ecopoiesis. New Literary History, 35(3), 427–442. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2004.0045

Rogers, C. (2021). Eco-Magical Realism: An Ecocritical Interpretation of the Hurricane in Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 28(4), 1579–1598. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isaa111

Roine, H.-R., & Samola, H. (2018). Johanna Sinisalo and the New Weird: Genres and Myths. In Lingua Cosmica (pp. 183–200). University of Illinois Press. https://doi.org/10.5622/illinois/9780252041754.003.0010

Samola, H. (2020). From Gilead to Eusistocratia: The Dialogue Between Margaret Atwood’s Dystopian Novel The Handmaids Tale and Johanna Sinisalo’s The Core of the Sun. In S. Isomaa, J. Korpua, & J. Teittinen (Eds.), New Perspectives on Dystopian Fiction in Literature and Other Media (pp. 45–64). Cambridge Scholars Publisher.

Sinisalo, J. (2021). Ukkoshuilu. Otava.