Økokulturell insularitet og relasjonstap i Sigbjørn Skådens Fugl

Abstract

Ecocultural Insularity and Relational Loss in Sigbjørn Skåden’s Fugl

This article reads Sigbjørn Skåden’s Fugl (2019) through island studies and the blue humanities, asking how an extraterrestrial planet takes on the function of an island and articulates relational loss. The analysis develops ecocultural insularity to describe the planet Heim (‘Home’), whose settlers are cut off from Earth, other forms of life, cultural memory, oral transmission, and navigable routes elsewhere. Drawing on Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s theory of Anthropocene allegory, it examines how Heim’s resistant geophysical conditions and protective enclosures produce isolation across scales. Scientific mapping and colonial ambitions fail to make the planet intelligible or habitable, foregrounding human dependence on ecocultural relations through their absence.

The names Persiles and Sigismunda connect Fugl (‘Bird’) to Miguel de Cervantes’s Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617). Rather than treating Cervantes’s novel as a source, the article reads its North Atlantic archipelago as a countertext to Heim. In Persiles, storms, sea journeys, and encounters generate instability, but also relations, possibilities, and hope. Heim’s sea, by contrast, cannot be navigated, and outer space offers no route back to Earth. This juxtaposition makes relational loss visible as more than spatial confinement: it entails the erosion of ecological dependencies and cultural continuities on which human survival rests. Without reducing Heim to a fixed allegorical meaning, the article suggests that the novel’s fractured chronology, geophysical estrangement, and Sámi resonances invite a multiscalar reading in which an imagined planetary future refracts conditions of life on Earth in the Anthropocene, while Persiles provides a relational counterimage through which the loss becomes legible.