Bortom ödelandet. En läsning av Stina Aronsons roman Hitom himlen

Abstract

In this artide the novel Hitom himlen (1946) (This side of heaven) written by the swedish au thor Stina Aronson (1892-1956) is analyzed and put into a historical context. In previous scholarly research Hitom himlen usually has been very tightly connected to the province, the laponia area, an archaic landscape beyond Logos. Inspired by new historicism and postcolonial thinkers my thesis here is that Stina Aronson with Hitom himlen created something more than just a picture of a remotely situated landscape. Both textually and structurally, I mean, Hitom himlen generates textual strategies con cerning intercultural encounters, which must be read in the light of the end of the second world war and the racist and fascist thoughts that occured at the time. Structurally these intercultural strategies principally appear through the narrator's constant negotiations between different groups of people, privileged and unprivileged; samer, laestadians and academic priests. According to this the narrator applies a polyfonic multi-lingual language where an intellectual, western language and a language which is influenced by the local people is used at the same time. In addition to this the narrator in Hitom himlen also uses a lot of misfitting words, "catachresis" to speak with Spivak, which indicate different understandings of the world. Hitom himlen then turns out to be an explicitly political text. A text where the narrator manages to criticize epistemological grids, a text where the narrator t hrough the ruptures focuses the rift between the narrow and the general.