Fiskar skriker när de dör

Korallrev som exempel på samspelet mellan människa och natur i tre texter av Ian Fleming

Abstract

“Fish Scream When They Die. Corall Reefs as an Example of the Interplay Between Man and Nature in Three Texts by Ian Fleming”

The essay focuses on one aspect of Ian Fleming’s interest in nature and ecology: the interplay between man and nature in the novel Live and Let Die (1954), and in two short stories: ”The Hildebrand Rarity” (1960) and “Octopussy” (1962). All three texts have coral reefs at the centre of climactic scenes, in which Nature strikes back at evil and criminal individuals: the mobster Mr. Big uses a coral reef as an outré instrument of execution; he ends his life as leopard shark food when he falls into the sea at the reef. The gangster Milton Krest poisons an entire coral reef with thousands of fish just to catch one single specimen of an extremely rare fish, the Hildebrand Rarity; his murderer stuffs the Hildebrand Rarity into his mouth, and the spines of the dorsal and anal fins catch inside his cheeks, thus causing him to suffocate. The thief and murderer Dexter Smythe tries to kill a deadly scorpion fish, which he plans to feed to the cephalopod Octopussy. The fish pricks his skin with its poisonous fins. Before Smythe is paralysed, he is pulled down into the deep by Octopussy, thus dying two deaths.

At a time when research on popular literature in Sweden is scarce, and the combination ecocriticism/popular literature is clearly underexploited in Swedish literary criticism, it would seem urgent to show the possibilities of this research area.