”Enää ei tule kesää”

Ympäristöherätys Timo K. Mukan romaanissa Ja kesän heinä kuolee

• Toni Lahtinen Tampereen yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74617

Abstract

”There will be no summer” – environmental awakening in Timo K. Mukka’s novel Ja kesän heinä kuolee

Timo K. Mukka’s (1944–1973) novel Ja kesän heinä kuolee (1968) is one of the first reactions in Finnish literature to the new environmental debates that took place in the 1960’s. Modern environmentalism began with ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’ in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). The title of Carson’s book that alludes to the loss of bird population, became a synecdoche for a larger environmental apocalypse. It is also an example of a new kind of environmental rhetoric of the 1960’s, when for instance, Paul Erlich introduced the concept of ecocatastrophe. is article gives a short introduction to the history of ecocriticism and examines Timo K. Mukka’s novel in relation to the environmental debates in the 1960’s.

The autofictional Ja kesän heinä kuolee intertwines personal and political issues. The wounded protagonist’s battle for his life in autumnal forest represents an allegory of mankind. In the article, Mukka’s novel is analysed in the light of Bakhtinian chronotophe that binds together the environmental elements and the self. Moreover, the allusions to Carson’s fable demonstrate the apocalyptical themes inscribed in the novel.

Already in Mukka’s earlier works, such as Maa on syntinen laulu (1964), critics detected an extraordinarily strong and close relationship between man and nature. But only in Ja kesän heinä kuolee the representation of nature became greatly influenced by the Western environmental debate. Despite the novel’s explicit dialogue with the social and political movements, the environmental themes went largely unnoticed in the reception of Mukka as a “mythic shaman”.