‘Aniara’: Secular Man’s One-Way Flight

Judged by standards of household or pulpit familiarity, Harry Edmund Martinson and Eyvind Johnson are scarcely in a class with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway. But these two Swedish writers shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Literature and so ascended to stand with Solzhenitsyn and the rest as Nobel laureates.

For the person who does not read Swedish, assessing these writers is difficult. The only work to be found in English is Martinson’s epic poem Aniara, published in 1956 and translated in 1963. But this small work makes the search worthwhile. Aniara tells the story of a sorrowladen interplanetary vehicle, a refugee ship from stricken Earth to Mars, lost forever in the galactic gloom. The poem is of particular interest to the Christian reader because it depicts with unusual clarity the terrified state of mind of secular man when he is without hope and without God.

The plot is simple. Poisoned by repeated warfare, Earth has been rendered uninhabitable. To escape, survivors of World War Thirty-Two emigrate to Mars on huge spaceships called “goldondas.” “Aniara” is one of these spaceships, measuring three miles long and half a mile wide and carrying 8,000 passengers. The poem is a first-hand record of that voyage, narrated by an engineer responsible for a godlike computer called the Mima. Among the Mima’s divine attributes are omniscience and compassion; its purpose is to entertain Earth’s orphans as they journey to Mars, looking toward the licentious freedoms that await them in the new Paradise.

But disaster overtakes “Aniara” when a near-collision with an asteroid causes the ship to swerve out of its course. Missing the orbit of Mars Aniara then attempts to steer toward some other refuge known to our galaxy. But hostile meteors and other forces prevent the earthship from succeeding, until at last, as the narrator laments, “we’d passed the point of no return.” Bound now for Lyra, a galaxy 15,000 light years away, the passengers resign themselves to the doom:

Our unhappy fate was certain now,

our only hope the Mima would

keep going to whatever end.

For six years the Mima, now revered as a female deity, devotes herself to comforting the despairing, who prostrate themselves before her shrine. Her screens project vistas of unknown and unknowable rapture somewhere in the cosmos, causing glimmers of hope. But these are even more futile than the sexual orgies in which the emigrants indulge—frenzied, goaded by rhythms of remorse, conscious that they are lost:

Slowly we realize the space

we travel in is a different kind

to what we always pictured in our minds

when the word “space” caught our imagination

on earth—it dawns upon us now

the extent to which we are cut off

must be far greater than we first feared

—that knowledge was a blue naïveté

which from a measured dose of thought

inferred the Mystery had form.

Instead, the narrator knows that “we are lost in oceans of the Spirit.”

When the Mima can no longer withstand cruel reality, she destroys herself. Gone with her exploding psycho-mechanism are illusions of rescue for those now eternally marooned. Earth’s displaced persons, bereft of the Mima, must turn back to long-forsaken primitive religions—the Cult of the Vagina, the Sect of Ticklers—and other hedonistic preoccupations to rid their minds of gnawing fear.

For the next two decades the narrator keeps up his logbook while the spaceship wallows in the void, every reason for human hope collapsing in the certainty that “the universe plays dice.” Indeed, like other phantoms of the imagination—“The Flying Dutchman” or the Ancient Mariner’s accursed vessel—“Aniara” is destined to drift forever without a landfall. For its ill-fated passengers, the future is a one-way trip to Nowhere.

Yet there is time to reflect on the profundities of the Unthinkable and on man’s place in that single cosmic flyspeck he calls “the world.” The reflection finds its norms in biblical allusion and uses terms familiar to the Christian. Eden, from which man was driven by sin, has been left behind in ruins; the curse of evil permeates our whole galaxy. Thus whatever Promised Land awaits must be somewhere in the outer reaches of the Beyond and must be struggled for. So a blind poetess sings:

Each fight for Heaven is a fight for joy.

The goal of every heart is Paradise.

Her prophetic witness is more than idle optimism. Like other spokesmen for the Lord of Hosts, she knows the difficulties of living the faith: “How hard to fuse one’s faith with daily living!”

There is even an old-style evangelistic camp meeting onboard “Aniara,” with hell-fire preaching and “dirges of repentance.” But at the time the narrator professes only revulsion for “the dreary chanting/of hideous songs by these grey fakirs of contrition.” He prefers to think about a question of greater immediate concern, namely, how to repair the Mima. Committed as he is to the panaceas of scientism, the narrator considers any Jacob’s Ladder to be ironic and tragic, for to summon man into the apparent presence of God is to lure him to his doom.

Moreover, the narrator believes, all creative and destroying power already lies in man’s possession; he needs no further divine intervention. Indeed, both God and Satan have deserted man, seeking to escape from “the King of Ashes,” homo destructus.

But with the inevitable looming ever closer, the narrator begins to change his priorities. He knows there is no way to “shut out the intolerable void”—a void both without and within. Outside the interplanetary omnibus yawns an immensity unfathomable to the human mind; through its “gaping gorges” rush all the pent-up shock waves of evil, forever imprisoning our galaxy and corroding human aspirations. Even so, the broad expanse without is no match for those gulfs and chasms within, “a void/ which must be constantly filled and embellished.” The narrator also begins to understand that “no one can hide his inner emptiness,” and he wishes to make known the message of truth as he now perceives it, no matter how late it may be.

That truth, hinted at from the beginning of the poem, crashes in upon the narrator as he approaches his end. “The sheer absurdity of living” in a technological nightmare whose only morality is “a contrived chaos” convinces the narrator to look somewhere beyond mechanistic theory for a means to fill the emptiness within. On the final night of human life aboard the spaceship “Aniara”—just before its final plunge into the frozen vacuum of Nothingness—the narrator realizes his error. In keeping with the literary conventions of the epic, the storyteller has the right to pass on his experience to later generations:

I had coveted a Paradise for this race

but since we left the one we had destroyed

the Zodiac’s lonely night became our only home,

a gasping chasm in which no god could hear us.

The eternal mystery of Heaven’s stars,

the miracle of the celestial mechanism,

is the law but not the Gospel.

Mercy can only thrive where there is life.

One of Aniara’s principal themes, then, is secular man’s ultimate realization of his appalling “inner emptiness” and the need to fill it. This awareness has been growing in the consciousness of Western man since his takeover by twentieth century technocrats midway through the 1950s. Drained of spiritual values and thereby reduced to the subexistence of a zombie, modern man careens through life like an animated doll in Toyland. He is perfectly described by Eliot in “The Hollow Men”:

Shape without form, shade without color,

Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.

Even if the wind-up toy should run down, secular man is not without his resources. His highest aim now, according to an ebullient analysis by F. M. Esfandiary in the New York Times (September 24, 1974), is “to overcome aging and, in time, death itself” through the developing of “life-support technologies.” By this Esfandiary means the replacement of human parts with manmade substitutes: “We will continue to de-animalize our bodies, creating new durable attractive physiologies.” When these fail, there is always the prospect of anabiosis, “freezing of the body immediately after death until a suitable time in the future when the body can be revived.”

It is, of course, naïve for the supernaturalist to ask someone of a thoroughly secular mentality about the spiritual dimension of man, about the relation between cryogenics and the eternal soul. Yet Harry Martinson, the prophet-poet of the Space Age, is not afraid to ask; nor is he afraid to bring his protagonist across the secular desert and through the midnight of scientism’s despair, to find, at least, the ember-glow of truth that will not expire.

The vanities of scientism, as the Preacher of Ecclesiastes also knew, are merely a striving after wind. If we do not know its Creator, Nature “stabs us from behind”—in the words of Herman Melville—“with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way.” But the chronicler of the voyage of “Aniara” has not forgotten entirely the ageless cosmic promise of Good News—the coming of a hero-redeemer whose love heals the heart of its loneliness.

So man need not face the Unknown with empty, stoical resolve, or with crazy, libidinous desperation. Where the laws of ecstasy and entropy fail, the Gospel is sufficient unto the uttermost—the farthest ranges of condition, the deepest fathoms of need, the trackless tundras of egorspace, the frozen glaciers of doubt, even unto the astral graveyards of disbelief.

In the end, Martinson concurs with another poet, David of Bethlehem, who knew well enough the proportions of space to cry out in joyous relief. “If I take my flight to the frontiers of the morning or dwell at the limit of the western sea, even there thy hand will meet me and thy right hand will hold me” (Ps. 139:9, 10, NEB).

This assurance the Christian commends to every sojourner in time and space.

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