”Och vi trippar in i bergets svarta strupe”

En läsning av berg, sten och porös temporalitet i Mare Kandres I ett annat land och Stig Dagermans De dömdas ö.

Abstract

”And we’re tip-toing into the black throat of the mountain”: Mountain, stone and porous temporality in Mare Kandre’s I ett annat land and Stig Dagerman’s De dömdas ö.

The title of this article is borrowed from Mare Kandre’s debut novel I ett annat land (1984). The novel tells the story of a young girl who is traveling with her family in a distant country where sensory experience embosses the narrative and aesthetic. The mountain is one of several more-than-human bodies that the protagonist encounters, and it vividly affects her. Nearly forty years earlier, Stig Dagerman wrote his feverish and surrealist novel De dömdas ö (1946), where a few shipwrecked humans spend their last remaining days on a remote island. As in Kandre’s novel, there is a profound focus on sensory experiences between the human and the more-than-human, and the stony appearance of a mountain becomes an important part of the landscape.

The purpose of this article is to study how the stony formations in both novels are created and whether it is possible to understand them as active elements that contribute to the narratives. Through sedimentation, rocks have the capacity to incorporate both time and place in their materiality, and it is therefore possible to regard them as spatio-temporal bodies. Comparing and combining I ett annat land with De dömdas ö in a material ecocritical analysis enables a deeper understanding of how more-than-human matter may constitute a complex part of the storyworld. I will illuminate how these non-organic bodies, through their specific materiality in the sensuous and metaphorical aesthetics of the two novels, brings forth new stories about agency, belonging, and coloniality.