Harry martinson’s ”Aniara” (1956) is a not only a modern tragedy – the circumstances have made that it has remained uncovered up to date. It is a versepos of humanity after a kärnvapenkatastrof – but also about the time after a global catastrophe. The people on board of the spacecraft are doomed to their journey without a goal, forever out of the course at the ghost ship that Aniara in practice. The factual realism of the narrative from the spaceship grows out a symbolic reflection of a humanity that has created its own destruction.
the background story behind this framtidsepos is simple. Large parts of the earth has become uninhabitable because of radiation, caused by the atombombskrig, and people have to emigrate to other planets. Aniara is a very pendlarfarkost, a ”goldonder”, which transports several thousand people at a time from earth to Mars. In a meteoritsvärm lose the ship direction and maneuverability and is now travelling further and further out in space, hurtling towards the constellation of the Lyre. While the years pass, some passengers crazy. Other amusing themselves with dancing or drömmerier. The passengers also develop a number of religions, including a vaginakult which in practice means a collective sex orgy during the ceremonial forms. The leading women are worshipped almost like goddesses.
the inventory of different livshållningar trying to deal with the horror of the emptiness. Martinson noted myself that the story took place in what he himself called several different ”medvetanderum”. And he clarified: ”The many rooms and halls of the goldondern Aniara is, if you want to take them, spiritual category-rooms, attitydkamrar, upplevelsekretsar or simply different ways to feel, think and live.”
Harry is a miniatyrsamhälle with a management team where the most high is Chefone. He is a mysterious, scheming figure who most closely resembles a dictator in a one-party state. The entire samhällskick that Harry is of the same kind: many of the people have no other future than that ” in mines and swamps on Mars and Venus. Many are executed ruthlessly in something similar to the gas chambers. ”Aniara” is thus clearly marked by its time and of the recent past, of the horrors of world war ii, the atomic bomb and the cold war. But the story grows effortlessly out of his tidssammanhang. In an interview, said Martinson itself that it could just as well be seen as a comment to the ongoing destruction of the environment.
Behind the skräckbilderna of mankind’s self-inflicted future disasters is an ambivalence toward technology that Martinson had developed during several decades. Long as he was a technical massed, a proponent of steam power and the bikes skeptical of such things as electricity and cars. Abhorrence against the use of cars is visible in works such as ”the Road to Klockrike” (1948) and the poetry collection ”the Chariot” (1960). The latter brought closest to the scandal in the rekordårens Sweden, when the author was impertinent enough to highlight bilsamhällets the downsides.
Martinson said myself that ”Harry” could just as well be seen as a comment to the ongoing destruction of the environment.
of teknikoptimism of Martinson, and later, he was all the more the idea that only the technology could save people from the technology’s downsides. Already in 1947, however, he in a strange letter how a society with ”solmaskinsföreningar” would be able to become independent of the atomkraften.
technology and science spurred his imagination is visible, of course, in the ”Aniara”, as well as his interest in science fiction. A central presence on the Aniara is the password, an appliance that can most easily be described as a combination of supercomputer and artificial intelligence, several thousand times superior to man in intellectual capacity (it can of course also be seen as a symbol of art and culture). The password can crawl all the existing information, to fantasize, to view virtual images, provide advice and comfort. So advanced is the password that the half has created himself. The devoted a cult by many of those who glide through the cold emptiness.
But the password is broken down when she infångar signals from the kärnvapenkatastrofer who got the stones to cook and people to be destroyed in a millionth of a second. She has developed a conscience and do not want to produce more. ”Despite all his clear-sightedness she saw no salvation / for those who murats into the evil borg.” The narrator in ”Aniara” is just mimans omvårdare (”mimaroben”), which, after mimans death of the ungrateful responsibility to create some form of compensation. Which is done with the equivalent of virtual reality, projections as to shut out the emptiness around the craft. Also the possibility of waning.
big in ”Aniara”, from the lofty to the spexartade and cheeky framtidsslang. In this chilling dystopia are also plenty of poetic playfulness. Martinson played with rhyme and meter, with rymdberättelsens opportunities, with notions of technology, with something so out of fashion that verseposets form.
In ”Aniara” carry the people on the memories of a climate catastrophe, however, caused by a ”köldnebulosa” rather than of the people themselves. The covered large parts of the earth in the ice for thousands of years, and drove humanity back into barbarism:
Twelve thousand years, the people savages
as with the fragments and remnants of the technology
awaiting the sun to regenerate
nature’s forests and culture of the kingdoms.
not by the people themselves, but their own reaction is, in itself, a disaster. They fail miserably to deal with climate change – and therein lies their guilt. When Martinson was interviewed on ”Aniara” he often spoke about the right debt to a basic theme. The people have to live with the memory of what they have caused, barbarity, kärnvapenkatastroferna, prison camps, and avrättningskamrarna. As it is called in one of the bitterest and most famous verses:
There is a protection against almost everything that is
against fire and damage by storm and the cold
yes, count up, what kind as can be.
But there is no protection against the man.
Behind the scenery along the whole route there is, therefore, a strict morality, directed against human hubris. ”Aniara is a cruel poem,” said Martinson in an interview. ”It gives the law, not the gospel. When it has gone so far for humanity as the Aniara, then we can not get the gospel free of charge. We can only regain it by improving ourselves.”
the People fail miserably to deal with climate change – and therein lies their guilt.
published parts of the ”Aniara” was the critics baffled (he was not risky close to science fiction?), but when the whole epic came out in 1956 it became a great success. Soon broke out, the closest to a ”Aniarafeber” in the country – and a restaurant received during the five-year period to pay an annual fee to the author for the was added to with the name of the epic. ”Aniara” has since claimed its place among our classics. It will regularly on a range of literary best-of lists, it tops the list of popular works in Swedish literature bank. It has for example been to the opera, ballet, television drama, theatre and music. Once upon a time inspired also to a word which now almost seems to have fallen away from the Swedish language – ”Aniarabarn”. And a lot of research literature has grown up around the epic. A film adaptation now will is really less surprising than that it has taken so long.
”Aniara” retains its topicality in a time when the idea of the Big End is a firearm pressed against humanity’s temple. But the icy cold that emanates from the epic also has strong elements of tenderness: a feeling of sympathy with the vilsefarna humanity that is locked away in a self-inflicted fate.
So the DN wrote:s Olof Lagercrantz on ”Aniara” in 1956
the Swedish socialrealism and Las Vegas kitsch in the film adaptation of ”Aniara”
