Romer i romanen - Aarhus Universitet

English Summary – Romer in the Novel
Knud Romers début novel Den som blinker er bange for døden (He who Blinks is Afraid to Die)
was published in June 2006 and received a media attention considerably larger than the average
literary début: Not only was the book reviewed in all the major newspapers, Romer did also
participate in interviews in both the written and the electronic media. The media attention seemed to
focus on the fact that, all though the book on the cover was categorised as a novel, the main
character and narrator was named Knud Romer and the subject of the book was Knud Romers own
childhood in Nykøbing Falster in the 70thies. This name resemblance and use of biographical
information seemed to place the book somewhere between novel and autobiography, between
fiction and reality. This ambiguity caused an ethical discussion in which some of Romer’s former
classmates accused him of lying about the time in Nykøbing, while other debaters claimed that the
question about truth and lies was irrelevant since the book was fiction. All though this debate was
quite extensive, it had in my opinion one considerably lack: Nobody tried to read the use of
biographical information as an aesthetic strategy. This thesis should be seen as my attempt to
perform such a reading.
I have chosen to use the concept performative biographism as a theoretical basis for this thesis.
Performative biographism is Jon Helt Haarders term for an artistic praxis in which the artist
deliberately uses his own person in the work of art (Haarder 2005). When used in literary works,
this praxis causes an analytical problem, because it seems to undermine the texts’ autonomy: The
text can not be fully analysed without reference to the author. By explicitly placing himself in front
of the work the author stresses the fact that he will always be in the work – despite the fact that most
literary theory has tried to prove otherwise. The authors influence on the reading of the text has
increased during the last decades because the electronic media has been able to communicate
information about the author in an expressive and plain way. As a result the reader will always have
a certain image of the author’s personality and private life, and this image will inevitably influence
on the reading of the text. Haarder terms this condition biographic irreversibility.
An important theme in the performative biographism seems to be our conception of the self. By
referring to biographical information, often in form of a personal trauma, the author confirms his
own existence. He insists on his self as a given entity and seems in this way to elevate the self from
a post modern idea that implies that the self is dependent of the communicative situation. But this
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